Yeah, this should not be about a corporate competitive advantage, but about the betterment of society.
That's admirable sentiment but let's be real. As a general proposition, corporations only care about the betterment of society insofar as it also helps their bottom line. You can make a pretty good argument that a diverse workforce chosen for their capabilities will increase chances for corporate profits AND also better society. But if a corporation's management perceives (true or not) advantage in having a work force that isn't diverse then they are likely to oppose diversity efforts and just pay lip service to diversity for PR purposes. The people in the company might mean well but the pressure for profits tends to drown out even well intended other priorities.
Diversity can be a huge asset. There is plenty of evidence that having people with different backgrounds and ideas results in better outcomes for companies. If everyone looks the same and has the same background there is a strong tendency towards group think and important ideas get overlooked. The bigger the company and the more diverse the customer base the more important this tends to become. I know I've learned a lot from my colleagues who come from different backgrounds and cultures and I'm more effective in my job because they bring me a different perspective that I might not have considered.
Think about it this way: while it hard to solve a crime, it is even harder to prevent a crime.
It is almost always easier to prevent a crime than to solve one after the fact. A lot less costly too. If it were not easier to prevent crimes then there would be a lot more crimes committed than there are. Take shoplifting for instance. Companies spend a lot of resources preventing shoplifting because it is FAR more effective, cheaper, and easier than just trying to catch and punish the criminals. A manager of a store I once worked with said that the most effective tactics are really aimed to keep honest people honest.
On top of that it is much easier to track and measure "crimes solved" versus "crimes prevented"...
Sometimes this is true but only for specific cases and it's not actually true as a general proposition. It's actually pretty easy to figure out how effective a crime prevention tactic is by simply measuring the before and after results. Shoplifting was X% of sales before implementing a tactic and Y% afterwards. Voila you have measured crimes prevented.
ut I can imagine a far less threatening scenario that would address the situation that law enforcement mostly talks about, which is the inability to break into a locked phone.
I regard that as just too bad for them. I'm not about to give up my rights just because it makes their job harder. I firmly believe that we should allow 1,000 guilty men to go free rather than convict a single innocent man. We have the 5th amendment for a reason and I see no reason why we should allow it to be trampled on just to placate some lazy cops.
Put a hardware access method on the phone that lets the phone be decrypted at the cost of destroying the phone, and while I still think it is not worth doing, it wouldn't be nearly as bad as intentionally weakened software.
That is one of the dumbest ideas I've read in a while. Do you have any idea how fast some bored teenager or bad actor would start destroying phones intentionally?
If the cops have to get a warrant to break into my phone, need the physical phone to do it, and can't tracelessly root it and return it to me with me being none the wiser, my level of concern goes way down.
That is just another riff on the "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument. If I have something encrypted and the cops can't get it without my help then that is just too darn bad for them. They'll have to find other ways to build their case. If they can't build a case then that is the system working the way it is supposed to. Law enforcement is by and large a bigger danger to me than criminals or terrorists and that is the reason we have constitutional protections against abuse.
I don't mind seeing advertising that pays for the content I browse
I do because I have yet to find an advertiser that can provide me adequate assurances that data about me isn't being tracked and sold. I *might* be willing to live with some non-obtrusive ads if I could be sure of and control what was done with the data gathered. But until I control that process (which I have no illusions will ever happen) the ads will remain blocked and I will fight tracking with every resource at my disposal. If that means I have access to less content then so be it. Unlike you I actually value my privacy.
I installed an adblocker because to much of the above "bad" ads were interrupting browse, and now I've uninstalled it because every site I encounter requires me to 'disable adblock before proceeding'.
Either you had the wrong ad blocker or you are browsing sites I never go to. I almost never see ad-blocker notices and sites that refuse to work with one enabled I deem to be ones I didn't need to go to anyway. Seriously it just isn't a problem. Even on my mobile devices.
Amen, I am actually cool with this practice. I have always been in favour of some kind of micropayment for enjoying commercially produced content
I'm not and I think you are out of your mind if you are cool with this. They are the ones who have a shitty business model dependent on me subsidizing them with my computer resources and attention. I block ads mostly because I don't like being tracked and I don't trust them with the data. I will block anyone trying to do that and if that costs them money that is no my problem. They certainly don't get to use my computer to mine money without contracting with me to do it first. They can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned if they try to do that behind my back.
Also bear in mind that I might be using my company's computer to read that website. Lots of people including me do not have the authority to allow a third party to use company computers for such a purpose without the express permission of the company even if the company is cool with the reading a Salon article.
The arrogance of Salon is kind of breathtaking here.
I always wanted to pay something like $0.02 per page.
That's fine but I don't think you've done the math on the cost per page if you think $0.02/page is reasonable. For me that could easily top $50/day at that sort of price point. You're mileage may vary but I think it will be more expensive than you realize. I don't have a principled objection to pay-as-you-go (sans ads of course) but I'm not about to pay that sort of ridiculous rate. I do subscribe to websites I find valuable (several of them) but most of them don't offer me enough value to bother. Salon certainly does not. And if I'm not willing to subscribe it seems unlikely I'm going to be ok with giving them a free pass to run up my power bill and slow down my computer.
Paying about 1X10E-4 or E-5 Watt-hour instead sounds like a great compromise.
Not to me it doesn't. If they want to approach me directly and offer such a deal then fine but they do not get to just go ahead and do it because I happened to load one of their articles with an ad blocker active. If they want to put up an offer when the web page loads that's fine. I can take the offer or leave it. (and I assure you I will leave it) But if they simply go ahead and start trying to mine bitcoin on my computer without asking me first, now we have a fight.
And US eggs are pasteurized and sanitatized (steril was the wrong word).
Most eggs sold in the US are washed but most are NOT pasteurized. According to the USDA less than 3% of eggs sold in the US are pasteurized though that number is rising.
So while a US egg lasts 5 weeks after packing (regs wise); UK eggs last 3 weeks. 4th if you refrigerate at home..
Citation needed. The times you quote are at best guidelines from egg producers and are not based in rigorous independent studies. Eggs can and do last a lot longer than 5 weeks after packing and they usually take a week or two to get to a store and get purchased. I routinely eat eggs that are older than 5 weeks which are perfectly good. I raise my own chickens so my information is from both first hand experience and from credible sources who have actually researched the issue.
Part of what you say is true
Far more than a part of what I say is true but thanks for the backhanded compliment/insult.
a US treated egg going through a UK supply chain probably won't make the one week journey to the store.
So what? It wouldn't be legal (or smart) to sell a US egg in the UK because of the handling differences. Once you wash it the clock starts ticking unless you immediately refrigerate it. You're making a strawman argument here.
Also, our washing may seem expensive to others around the world, but keep in mind that at the end of the day, the prices are about the same with UK eggs just a percent or three higher.
A few percent matters a lot. Margins in food production are thin to begin with so every little bit matters. Farmers and supermarkets live on just a few percent margin and modest differences in prices make a big difference in total sales. The reason you don't notice the price difference much is because US eggs are prohibited by regulation from competing with UK eggs and it's more complicated than just washing versus not because the supply chains are substantially different from beginning to end.
The majority of the consumers in the US do not have the same opinion.
The majority of consumers in the US haven't given the matter a moment's thought and they certainly aren't informed on the facts. The regulations regarding eggs in the US were passed before most of them were born and they've never see or even considered an alternate option.
The problem is that there is no middle ground here. Putting any sort of back door into encryption effectively renders it useless. The cops can say whatever they want but that is an indisputable fact and isn't negotiable even if we wanted to. You can have good encryption or for all practical purposes no encryption. There is literally no middle ground.
Even if we trusted the cops (and history tells us we shouldn't) the cops aren't the only party in play here. If the cops have a back door then so do black hats, criminals, foreign nations, and anyone else. So we get lots of whining by politicians and cops who are either clueless or disingenuous or both.
My point is that most of that R&D money is being spent on replacing their current business model with self driving cars
So what? Google has a HUGE war chest from their ad business to finance the R&D and a big head start. Same with GM and Ford plus they actually make cars. Tesla is in the mix too and while they don't have the cash they do have the technology and know how to make cars. Where is Uber's competitive advantage here? Even if they develop some viable technology they will have to partner with someone else to make it and that sort of joint venture is inherently unstable because it requires splitting the profits.
Drivers working for less than minimum wage and not being able to cover their own wear and tear actually makes them even more profitable.
Umm, maybe for a short time but those costs HAVE to be recouped eventually.
They already have a version of Uber that works with human drivers; they don't need to spend money researching that.
Since it isn't even CLOSE to profitable, they haven't solved that problem yet. It's not clear that they have any meaningful cost advantage and are just convincing investors to finance their attempt to buy market share. Not clear how that will be sustainable once the subsidies go away. At their current burn rate they will be out of cash a long time before driverless cars become commercially viable.
It's not just volume. Uber is really two parts. The ride sharing side and the company researching self driving cars side. It would be interesting to see that broken down. My guess is that the ride sharing side would likely be profitable if the R&D side wasn't eating up their profit plus some.
Why do you assume that Uber's ride sharing is profitable? There is to my knowledge zero evidence to suggest that Uber's ride sharing is profitable or that it even has a path to profitability. It's not clear they have a cost advantage over their competition and the costs of running a taxi service are largely fixed (fuel, labor, etc) with limited economies of scale. Plus there actually is data out there on how Uber spends their money and it appears their losses mostly are from trying to buy their way into markets by discounting ride sharing below cost. Yes they have a lot of revenue growth but it's easy to generate a lot of sales by selling $2 bills for $1.
Driverless cars are an existential risk to lots of current companies which is why so many companies are either researching it or investing in companies that are.
In Uber's case it's hard to see what their business model is or where they have any sort of advantage when it comes to driverless cars. Uber is losing billions per year on ridesharing and their competitors (google, ford, gm, etc) all MAKE billions in profit per year or in the case of Tesla actually make cars. Given that real driverless cars are at least a decade away from widespread commercial viability (sorry you won't see them next year) I cannot see any meaningful business model that won't result in Uber running out of cash long before driverless cars become a viable product unless Uber can get to at least breakeven on their ride sharing business.
They are running a filter to remove background seismic activity so that they can better read the signal from earthquakes that are not close to the seismograph. New application of old techniques to all appearances. Not knocking the technology just worried that they are slapping the label AI on anything vaguely clever that uses a computer.
When you have a single implementation of a protocol, some people are always going to hate it. When you have an open protocol with multiple client implementations, you can choose the UI that you like
And then you get flame wars about which UI is best and added costs to handle them all plus a lot of reinventing the figurative wheel. There are drawbacks no matter what approach you use. I think in general I agree with you that the open protocol approach is better for most circumstances. Unfortunately it's not necessarily better for specific parties. For a circumstance like this I doubt Snapchat finds much profit in the protocol approach. Their house, their rules I guess.
If there's only one implementation, particularly if it's closed source, then you're at the whims of whoever is responsible for it.
Very true but in fairness not always a bad thing. (just usually) Having a single implementation can make things a lot simpler, less costly, and require less training. Whether or not that is a good thing in a particular circumstance is an exercise for the reader.
I personally like not having to clean the chicken shit from my eggs when I get home from the store.
So don't clean it off. Seriously, it isn't necessary except in rare cases and it's unlikely to harm you in any way. Washing in many cases actually increases the risk of getting salmonella and other pathogens into the egg so I prefer eggs that are actually safe and produced with best practices. 90+% of the world doesn't wash eggs the way they do in the US and they get similar to better results. A lot of egg producers vaccinate their birds against salmonella.
I raise my own chickens and eat the eggs they lay. Sometimes the shells have a little poop on them and there is vast evidence that this does not present a serious health risk if the birds and eggs are handled properly. If this grosses you out then you are a bit of a weenie and you aren't basing your behavior on actual evidence.
Did you read? These will be (extremely) LEO satellites as opposed to geo-sync ones.
Did you? Do you see ANY numbers in the summary? "Lower" doesn't tell me shit. Being lower latency than a geo-sync satellite is the very definition of damning with faint praise. My question was HOW MUCH faster which means give me quantities.
The biggest contributer to latency is the distance
No shit Sherlock. The question (again) is how much better will these newer LEO systems be? If they are not faster and/or cheaper than the alternatives then they are dead on arrival. So give me a published number for what the latency and real world bandwidth is supposed to be.
This is true and not necessarily a good thing. It's also arguably unnecessary if you design the supply chain properly. As evidence see how eggs are handled in other countries without the same amount of washing. Most places in the world do not bother with the expensive cleaning and refrigeration systems the US supply chain requires.
In the US, the entire supply chain from post clean to shopping cart has to be germ free.
Not even remotely true and not possible either. The supply chain does have safe food handling regulations including cleaning and refrigeration and testing but safe handling does not equal germ free. If it was germ free it would be FAR more expensive.
Now the US egg lasts a lot longer because it's been sterilized and sits in a sterile environment.
A) They aren't sterilized. Some (but not all) eggs are pasteurized which isn't the same thing. Those that aren't are cleaned but nothing remotely close to sterile.
B) Eggs are most certainly not stored in a sterile environment nor are they handled in a sterile manner in most of the supply chain. Especially once they reach the grocery store. People open literally almost every egg carton to ensure no breakage prior to purchase so they are a LONG way from sterile by the time you get your hands on them.
C) Eggs in the US demonstrably do not last longer and because of how they are processed they have to be refrigerated which is not required other places. I own chickens and eggs that aren't cleaned (which removes the protective coatings) actually can sit on a counter for weeks without ill effect even without refrigeration. US eggs are refrigerated which makes a difference but you can refrigerate uncleaned eggs too and get the same effect. Once you refrigerate an egg though it has to stay refrigerated until you use it.
You see folks, I once tried burning cheese using a lighter flame. Guess what; I didn't melt! At that point, I threw out all the cheese I had and have never bought any again. It's been 7 years now.
In a similar vein I stopped buying orange juice that isn't fresh squeezed from oranges right in front of me. Basically most orange juice sold these days is stored in oxygen free vats for up to a year which removes all the flavor and then the "flavor" is reintroduced using so called flavor packs which ensures it all tastes exactly the same. I'm not a fussy eater but I'll just make my own orange juice if I want some thanks.
Yes I'm aware that a lot of stuff we eat is probably similarly disgusting but gotta start somewhere right?
SpaceX is one of several companies planning low-Earth orbit satellite broadband networks that could offer much higher speeds and much lower latency than existing satellite internet services.
How much lower latency? Any satellite service necessarily is going to have significant latency just because of the physics involved. Always nice to have options but what sort of speeds and how much latency are we talking about compared with existing wire line and wireless terrestrial options?
having to buy a 1-month subscription for $5.99 just to read one article
So buy one subscription that aggregates articles. That's basically what the Associated Press is anyway. Or buy the article piece-rate. Maybe the value of that article is only $0.01 or less per read. Advertisers have to guess how much it will cost to get someone's attention so I see no reason why content providers should be unable to figure it out. Or give the article away and make money on something else like merchandise sales.
If no readers are willing to pay you for your article then maybe that says something about its market value and your business model.
or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt.
Someone else's bad business model is not my problem. I'm not about to relax my grip on my time and personal information just because someone else feels entitled to make a profit from it. If the advertiser wants my attention they can pay me cash money for it. Otherwise they can fuck off and I do not care at all if they go bankrupt. Your assumption that they are somehow entitled to profit from information about me is an assertion I reject completely.
Are you saying that Google actually runs ads like those being discussed?
I'm saying I don't care what kind of ads they run. Just being less overtly obnoxious doesn't make them any less creepy to me. In fact it's the ones who quietly try to track my every movement on the internet and who try to profile me that offend me the most.
The New York Times belong in the same checkout lane rack as the National Enquirer and those hollywood tabloids.
What because it reports actual facts and doesn't pander to your need for confirmation bias? I'm guessing you get your "news" from Infowars, Fox "News" and Trump's twitter feed based on your post.
"While the Coalition’s consumer research was designed to identify the least preferred ad types, it also provides insight into consumers’ evaluation of a far broader range of ad experiences, including those more preferred by consumers.
"More preferred" actually translates as "less hated". Nobody actually prefers ads, they just hate some types more than others.
Naturally Google won't block any of their own ads...
I'll keep blocking all ads insofar as I can find the tools to do so. If google wants to actually pay me cash money to watch ads then we can revisit this discussion. I pay subscriptions for services I like. Ads just waste my bandwidth and time so companies that rely on them for their business model can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this should not be about a corporate competitive advantage, but about the betterment of society.
That's admirable sentiment but let's be real. As a general proposition, corporations only care about the betterment of society insofar as it also helps their bottom line. You can make a pretty good argument that a diverse workforce chosen for their capabilities will increase chances for corporate profits AND also better society. But if a corporation's management perceives (true or not) advantage in having a work force that isn't diverse then they are likely to oppose diversity efforts and just pay lip service to diversity for PR purposes. The people in the company might mean well but the pressure for profits tends to drown out even well intended other priorities.
Diversity can be a huge asset. There is plenty of evidence that having people with different backgrounds and ideas results in better outcomes for companies. If everyone looks the same and has the same background there is a strong tendency towards group think and important ideas get overlooked. The bigger the company and the more diverse the customer base the more important this tends to become. I know I've learned a lot from my colleagues who come from different backgrounds and cultures and I'm more effective in my job because they bring me a different perspective that I might not have considered.
Think about it this way: while it hard to solve a crime, it is even harder to prevent a crime.
It is almost always easier to prevent a crime than to solve one after the fact. A lot less costly too. If it were not easier to prevent crimes then there would be a lot more crimes committed than there are. Take shoplifting for instance. Companies spend a lot of resources preventing shoplifting because it is FAR more effective, cheaper, and easier than just trying to catch and punish the criminals. A manager of a store I once worked with said that the most effective tactics are really aimed to keep honest people honest.
On top of that it is much easier to track and measure "crimes solved" versus "crimes prevented"...
Sometimes this is true but only for specific cases and it's not actually true as a general proposition. It's actually pretty easy to figure out how effective a crime prevention tactic is by simply measuring the before and after results. Shoplifting was X% of sales before implementing a tactic and Y% afterwards. Voila you have measured crimes prevented.
ut I can imagine a far less threatening scenario that would address the situation that law enforcement mostly talks about, which is the inability to break into a locked phone.
I regard that as just too bad for them. I'm not about to give up my rights just because it makes their job harder. I firmly believe that we should allow 1,000 guilty men to go free rather than convict a single innocent man. We have the 5th amendment for a reason and I see no reason why we should allow it to be trampled on just to placate some lazy cops.
Put a hardware access method on the phone that lets the phone be decrypted at the cost of destroying the phone, and while I still think it is not worth doing, it wouldn't be nearly as bad as intentionally weakened software.
That is one of the dumbest ideas I've read in a while. Do you have any idea how fast some bored teenager or bad actor would start destroying phones intentionally?
If the cops have to get a warrant to break into my phone, need the physical phone to do it, and can't tracelessly root it and return it to me with me being none the wiser, my level of concern goes way down.
That is just another riff on the "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument. If I have something encrypted and the cops can't get it without my help then that is just too darn bad for them. They'll have to find other ways to build their case. If they can't build a case then that is the system working the way it is supposed to. Law enforcement is by and large a bigger danger to me than criminals or terrorists and that is the reason we have constitutional protections against abuse.
I haven't even heard about Salon until this came up.
Congratulations! You are one of todays lucky 10,0000.
I don't mind seeing advertising that pays for the content I browse
I do because I have yet to find an advertiser that can provide me adequate assurances that data about me isn't being tracked and sold. I *might* be willing to live with some non-obtrusive ads if I could be sure of and control what was done with the data gathered. But until I control that process (which I have no illusions will ever happen) the ads will remain blocked and I will fight tracking with every resource at my disposal. If that means I have access to less content then so be it. Unlike you I actually value my privacy.
I installed an adblocker because to much of the above "bad" ads were interrupting browse, and now I've uninstalled it because every site I encounter requires me to 'disable adblock before proceeding'.
Either you had the wrong ad blocker or you are browsing sites I never go to. I almost never see ad-blocker notices and sites that refuse to work with one enabled I deem to be ones I didn't need to go to anyway. Seriously it just isn't a problem. Even on my mobile devices.
Amen, I am actually cool with this practice. I have always been in favour of some kind of micropayment for enjoying commercially produced content
I'm not and I think you are out of your mind if you are cool with this. They are the ones who have a shitty business model dependent on me subsidizing them with my computer resources and attention. I block ads mostly because I don't like being tracked and I don't trust them with the data. I will block anyone trying to do that and if that costs them money that is no my problem. They certainly don't get to use my computer to mine money without contracting with me to do it first. They can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned if they try to do that behind my back.
Also bear in mind that I might be using my company's computer to read that website. Lots of people including me do not have the authority to allow a third party to use company computers for such a purpose without the express permission of the company even if the company is cool with the reading a Salon article.
The arrogance of Salon is kind of breathtaking here.
I always wanted to pay something like $0.02 per page.
That's fine but I don't think you've done the math on the cost per page if you think $0.02/page is reasonable. For me that could easily top $50/day at that sort of price point. You're mileage may vary but I think it will be more expensive than you realize. I don't have a principled objection to pay-as-you-go (sans ads of course) but I'm not about to pay that sort of ridiculous rate. I do subscribe to websites I find valuable (several of them) but most of them don't offer me enough value to bother. Salon certainly does not. And if I'm not willing to subscribe it seems unlikely I'm going to be ok with giving them a free pass to run up my power bill and slow down my computer.
Paying about 1X10E-4 or E-5 Watt-hour instead sounds like a great compromise.
Not to me it doesn't. If they want to approach me directly and offer such a deal then fine but they do not get to just go ahead and do it because I happened to load one of their articles with an ad blocker active. If they want to put up an offer when the web page loads that's fine. I can take the offer or leave it. (and I assure you I will leave it) But if they simply go ahead and start trying to mine bitcoin on my computer without asking me first, now we have a fight.
And US eggs are pasteurized and sanitatized (steril was the wrong word).
Most eggs sold in the US are washed but most are NOT pasteurized. According to the USDA less than 3% of eggs sold in the US are pasteurized though that number is rising.
So while a US egg lasts 5 weeks after packing (regs wise); UK eggs last 3 weeks. 4th if you refrigerate at home..
Citation needed. The times you quote are at best guidelines from egg producers and are not based in rigorous independent studies. Eggs can and do last a lot longer than 5 weeks after packing and they usually take a week or two to get to a store and get purchased. I routinely eat eggs that are older than 5 weeks which are perfectly good. I raise my own chickens so my information is from both first hand experience and from credible sources who have actually researched the issue.
Part of what you say is true
Far more than a part of what I say is true but thanks for the backhanded compliment/insult.
a US treated egg going through a UK supply chain probably won't make the one week journey to the store.
So what? It wouldn't be legal (or smart) to sell a US egg in the UK because of the handling differences. Once you wash it the clock starts ticking unless you immediately refrigerate it. You're making a strawman argument here.
Also, our washing may seem expensive to others around the world, but keep in mind that at the end of the day, the prices are about the same with UK eggs just a percent or three higher.
A few percent matters a lot. Margins in food production are thin to begin with so every little bit matters. Farmers and supermarkets live on just a few percent margin and modest differences in prices make a big difference in total sales. The reason you don't notice the price difference much is because US eggs are prohibited by regulation from competing with UK eggs and it's more complicated than just washing versus not because the supply chains are substantially different from beginning to end.
The majority of the consumers in the US do not have the same opinion.
The majority of consumers in the US haven't given the matter a moment's thought and they certainly aren't informed on the facts. The regulations regarding eggs in the US were passed before most of them were born and they've never see or even considered an alternate option.
The problem is that there is no middle ground here. Putting any sort of back door into encryption effectively renders it useless. The cops can say whatever they want but that is an indisputable fact and isn't negotiable even if we wanted to. You can have good encryption or for all practical purposes no encryption. There is literally no middle ground.
Even if we trusted the cops (and history tells us we shouldn't) the cops aren't the only party in play here. If the cops have a back door then so do black hats, criminals, foreign nations, and anyone else. So we get lots of whining by politicians and cops who are either clueless or disingenuous or both.
My point is that most of that R&D money is being spent on replacing their current business model with self driving cars
So what? Google has a HUGE war chest from their ad business to finance the R&D and a big head start. Same with GM and Ford plus they actually make cars. Tesla is in the mix too and while they don't have the cash they do have the technology and know how to make cars. Where is Uber's competitive advantage here? Even if they develop some viable technology they will have to partner with someone else to make it and that sort of joint venture is inherently unstable because it requires splitting the profits.
Drivers working for less than minimum wage and not being able to cover their own wear and tear actually makes them even more profitable.
Umm, maybe for a short time but those costs HAVE to be recouped eventually.
They already have a version of Uber that works with human drivers; they don't need to spend money researching that.
Since it isn't even CLOSE to profitable, they haven't solved that problem yet. It's not clear that they have any meaningful cost advantage and are just convincing investors to finance their attempt to buy market share. Not clear how that will be sustainable once the subsidies go away. At their current burn rate they will be out of cash a long time before driverless cars become commercially viable.
It's not just volume. Uber is really two parts. The ride sharing side and the company researching self driving cars side. It would be interesting to see that broken down. My guess is that the ride sharing side would likely be profitable if the R&D side wasn't eating up their profit plus some.
Why do you assume that Uber's ride sharing is profitable? There is to my knowledge zero evidence to suggest that Uber's ride sharing is profitable or that it even has a path to profitability. It's not clear they have a cost advantage over their competition and the costs of running a taxi service are largely fixed (fuel, labor, etc) with limited economies of scale. Plus there actually is data out there on how Uber spends their money and it appears their losses mostly are from trying to buy their way into markets by discounting ride sharing below cost. Yes they have a lot of revenue growth but it's easy to generate a lot of sales by selling $2 bills for $1.
Driverless cars are an existential risk to lots of current companies which is why so many companies are either researching it or investing in companies that are.
In Uber's case it's hard to see what their business model is or where they have any sort of advantage when it comes to driverless cars. Uber is losing billions per year on ridesharing and their competitors (google, ford, gm, etc) all MAKE billions in profit per year or in the case of Tesla actually make cars. Given that real driverless cars are at least a decade away from widespread commercial viability (sorry you won't see them next year) I cannot see any meaningful business model that won't result in Uber running out of cash long before driverless cars become a viable product unless Uber can get to at least breakeven on their ride sharing business.
They are running a filter to remove background seismic activity so that they can better read the signal from earthquakes that are not close to the seismograph. New application of old techniques to all appearances. Not knocking the technology just worried that they are slapping the label AI on anything vaguely clever that uses a computer.
When you have a single implementation of a protocol, some people are always going to hate it. When you have an open protocol with multiple client implementations, you can choose the UI that you like
And then you get flame wars about which UI is best and added costs to handle them all plus a lot of reinventing the figurative wheel. There are drawbacks no matter what approach you use. I think in general I agree with you that the open protocol approach is better for most circumstances. Unfortunately it's not necessarily better for specific parties. For a circumstance like this I doubt Snapchat finds much profit in the protocol approach. Their house, their rules I guess.
If there's only one implementation, particularly if it's closed source, then you're at the whims of whoever is responsible for it.
Very true but in fairness not always a bad thing. (just usually) Having a single implementation can make things a lot simpler, less costly, and require less training. Whether or not that is a good thing in a particular circumstance is an exercise for the reader.
I personally like not having to clean the chicken shit from my eggs when I get home from the store.
So don't clean it off. Seriously, it isn't necessary except in rare cases and it's unlikely to harm you in any way. Washing in many cases actually increases the risk of getting salmonella and other pathogens into the egg so I prefer eggs that are actually safe and produced with best practices. 90+% of the world doesn't wash eggs the way they do in the US and they get similar to better results. A lot of egg producers vaccinate their birds against salmonella.
I raise my own chickens and eat the eggs they lay. Sometimes the shells have a little poop on them and there is vast evidence that this does not present a serious health risk if the birds and eggs are handled properly. If this grosses you out then you are a bit of a weenie and you aren't basing your behavior on actual evidence.
Did you read? These will be (extremely) LEO satellites as opposed to geo-sync ones.
Did you? Do you see ANY numbers in the summary? "Lower" doesn't tell me shit. Being lower latency than a geo-sync satellite is the very definition of damning with faint praise. My question was HOW MUCH faster which means give me quantities.
The biggest contributer to latency is the distance
No shit Sherlock. The question (again) is how much better will these newer LEO systems be? If they are not faster and/or cheaper than the alternatives then they are dead on arrival. So give me a published number for what the latency and real world bandwidth is supposed to be.
Eggs are heavily cleaned in the US.
This is true and not necessarily a good thing. It's also arguably unnecessary if you design the supply chain properly. As evidence see how eggs are handled in other countries without the same amount of washing. Most places in the world do not bother with the expensive cleaning and refrigeration systems the US supply chain requires.
In the US, the entire supply chain from post clean to shopping cart has to be germ free.
Not even remotely true and not possible either. The supply chain does have safe food handling regulations including cleaning and refrigeration and testing but safe handling does not equal germ free. If it was germ free it would be FAR more expensive.
Now the US egg lasts a lot longer because it's been sterilized and sits in a sterile environment.
A) They aren't sterilized. Some (but not all) eggs are pasteurized which isn't the same thing. Those that aren't are cleaned but nothing remotely close to sterile.
B) Eggs are most certainly not stored in a sterile environment nor are they handled in a sterile manner in most of the supply chain. Especially once they reach the grocery store. People open literally almost every egg carton to ensure no breakage prior to purchase so they are a LONG way from sterile by the time you get your hands on them.
C) Eggs in the US demonstrably do not last longer and because of how they are processed they have to be refrigerated which is not required other places. I own chickens and eggs that aren't cleaned (which removes the protective coatings) actually can sit on a counter for weeks without ill effect even without refrigeration. US eggs are refrigerated which makes a difference but you can refrigerate uncleaned eggs too and get the same effect. Once you refrigerate an egg though it has to stay refrigerated until you use it.
You see folks, I once tried burning cheese using a lighter flame. Guess what; I didn't melt! At that point, I threw out all the cheese I had and have never bought any again. It's been 7 years now.
In a similar vein I stopped buying orange juice that isn't fresh squeezed from oranges right in front of me. Basically most orange juice sold these days is stored in oxygen free vats for up to a year which removes all the flavor and then the "flavor" is reintroduced using so called flavor packs which ensures it all tastes exactly the same. I'm not a fussy eater but I'll just make my own orange juice if I want some thanks.
Yes I'm aware that a lot of stuff we eat is probably similarly disgusting but gotta start somewhere right?
SpaceX is one of several companies planning low-Earth orbit satellite broadband networks that could offer much higher speeds and much lower latency than existing satellite internet services.
How much lower latency? Any satellite service necessarily is going to have significant latency just because of the physics involved. Always nice to have options but what sort of speeds and how much latency are we talking about compared with existing wire line and wireless terrestrial options?
People prefer ads to the other two possibilities:
There are FAR more than just two possibilities.
having to buy a 1-month subscription for $5.99 just to read one article
So buy one subscription that aggregates articles. That's basically what the Associated Press is anyway. Or buy the article piece-rate. Maybe the value of that article is only $0.01 or less per read. Advertisers have to guess how much it will cost to get someone's attention so I see no reason why content providers should be unable to figure it out. Or give the article away and make money on something else like merchandise sales.
If no readers are willing to pay you for your article then maybe that says something about its market value and your business model.
or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt.
Someone else's bad business model is not my problem. I'm not about to relax my grip on my time and personal information just because someone else feels entitled to make a profit from it. If the advertiser wants my attention they can pay me cash money for it. Otherwise they can fuck off and I do not care at all if they go bankrupt. Your assumption that they are somehow entitled to profit from information about me is an assertion I reject completely.
I prefer static images ads or text-only ads. If that's the end result of Google's filtering, I'm all for it.
I prefer no ads of any sort and no tracking. Google's preferred style of ads may be less obnoxious but it's more creepy.
Are you saying that Google actually runs ads like those being discussed?
I'm saying I don't care what kind of ads they run. Just being less overtly obnoxious doesn't make them any less creepy to me. In fact it's the ones who quietly try to track my every movement on the internet and who try to profile me that offend me the most.
tabloids can be a harmless guilty pleasure.
Tabloids might be a guilty pleasure but they are almost never harmless.
Anonymous, no strings attached, a clean cut transaction.
Wait are we talking about tabloids or the prostitute you just picked up?
The New York Times belong in the same checkout lane rack as the National Enquirer and those hollywood tabloids.
What because it reports actual facts and doesn't pander to your need for confirmation bias? I'm guessing you get your "news" from Infowars, Fox "News" and Trump's twitter feed based on your post.
"While the Coalition’s consumer research was designed to identify the least preferred ad types, it also provides insight into consumers’ evaluation of a far broader range of ad experiences, including those more preferred by consumers.
"More preferred" actually translates as "less hated". Nobody actually prefers ads, they just hate some types more than others.
Naturally Google won't block any of their own ads...
I'll keep blocking all ads insofar as I can find the tools to do so. If google wants to actually pay me cash money to watch ads then we can revisit this discussion. I pay subscriptions for services I like. Ads just waste my bandwidth and time so companies that rely on them for their business model can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned.