No one has ever been denied the ability to associate with members of their own party.
Not sure what point you are trying to make but you certainly missed the one in the discussion. Gerrymandering utilizes the association with a political party to remove the power of their vote by rigging the system. So if Party A draws the districts to favor Party A then members of Party B are being disenfranchised as a result. Members of Party B are effectively being deprived of their vote because their vote will not matter in the outcome of the election. The fact that they actually cast a ballot does not change the fact that their vote won't have any chance to affect the outcome because the electorate has been rigged.
That's because you didn't understand the argument.
Disagreeing does not mean I didn't understand the argument but thanks for the condescension.
The cars themselves from 20 years ago were mechanically the equal of cars today, power output aside.
I'm an automotive engineer with 20 years in the industry and run a company that makes parts for car companies. That argument is simply not true. Pick any measure you want and any automotive engineer worth their salary can show you how cars today have overall improved on cars from 20 years ago. Reliability, performance, power, traction, safety, durability, handling, materials, etc. It doesn't matter - cars today have as a whole improved across the board even in the fact of additional complexity. Your argument that cars haven't improved mechanically in the last 20 years is easily shown to be false as a general proposition.
If you want to argue that we are into diminishing returns on the improvement in cars then I can probably get on board with a reasonable argument to that effect. But claims that car mechanicals peaked in the 1990s and have gone no where since is just preposterous.
Anyway, back on topic; the cars of 20 and even 25 years ago had all of the important things we demand from cars, like being able to go over bumps gracefully, but none of the things we didn't, like remotely compromisable infotainment systems.
Saying cars 20 years ago could go over bumps adequately is true but it's false to say cars today don't do it any better. To argue otherwise is to claim that tens of thousands of automotive engineers have wasted their time for the last 20 years.
Therein lies the rub: If vehicles have become substantially heavier, and tires have only gotten a little wider, then handling is actually compromised
The width of tires is not remotely the only consideration. What tires are made of matters FAR more and that has improved. Furthermore, there is a lot more to handling than simply the tires. A car can be heavier and have better handling. While weight does play an important role, it isn't even close to the only factor that matters. Handling is a function of the sum of the parts and there is more than one equation to get it right.
People love the BRZ because it returns to that lightweight formula. The new Miata could have had more power, but that would have made it heavier.
Seriously? You're using a 2 seat sports car as an example of why all cars are no better than ones from 20 years ago? People love the BRZ and Miata because it's a fun and inexpensive little sports car for people who want fun and inexpensive little sports cars that drive well. Not everyone wants that and it's inappropriate to extrapolate that market segment to cars in general. It's one way to get a great handling car but not the only way. Good handling can be achieved in many ways. You'd be daft to argue that a Corvette or a BMW M4 doesn't handle well but light weight wasn't the primary goal of those cars. The lightweight sports car is merely one way to get excellent handling and not the only way. But even staying with the example you provided the Miata of today is measurably better than the one from 20 years ago.
Democrats won in nine of the 10 most-gerrymandered districts. But eight out of 10 of those districts were drawn by Republicans.
That's because of a tactic called "packing" whereby you try to concentrate the opposition into the fewest districts possible. The other major tactic is "cracking" which dilutes the voting power of the opposition across multiple districts. So it wouldn't be shocking at all to find a highly gerrymandered district drawn by the losing party. They do that so that they can win more seats elsewhere.
Why not simply add up all the votes over the entire population of interest ?
The problem is in how you define the entire population of interest. Gerrymandering is the act of politicians (or political parties) having the power to choose the population that is most likely to ensure they get elected.
The intent to disenfranchise is not even alleged in TFA, much less proven.
Gerrymandering by definition disenfranchises some group of people. If gerrymandering occurs then it is proven and the court found that it had occurred in this case so it is proven in the legal sense as well. Since gerrymandering doesn't occur by accident then it has to be intended. Whenever you make someone's vote effectively meaningless that is the very definition of disenfranchisement.
What an eloquent rebuttal. Full of facts and logic. I bow to your debating prowess.
You could get all that stuff on cars before, or swap it on. And it was common to do so.
Your argument is that because we could tune a car to perform better that cars from 20 years ago are the equal of those today? Dumbest argument I've heard in quite a while.
Cheapness is a thing. A-pillars have grown and making them small and still having rollover resistance is expensive.
Of course cost is a consideration and a crude design will typically be cheaper than an expensive one. However thick A pillars do not necessarily make for bad visibility if they are shaped cleverly and even if they did would you prefer a car that turns into crumpled aluminum foil in the event of a rollover?
Raw, unassisted handling peaked in the 1990s, when suspension geometry technology reached essentially the point we've reached today, but when vehicles were lighter.
Even if I accept your premise about "raw unassisted handling peaking" (which I do not) that doesn't mean handling has degraded since then. It's pretty clear that handling has improved quite a lot in the last 20 years. You don't have to take my word for it either - cars from the 90s are still on the road. It's not even a contest. Furthermore there is a LOT more to handling than suspension geometry and I disagree that suspension technology hasn't improved in the last 20 year either.
If you have a complaint, complain that the battery wasn't designed to last longer.
That's not the problem. The problem was that they didn't tell anyone they were doing it. Had they been up front about this behavior, people could have evaluated whether they cared or not (most probably wouldn't care) and made their purchasing decision accordingly. But instead Apple tried to pull a fast one and now that is biting them in the ass.
Them slowing down the device for a reasonable technical problem is fine. Not telling anyone they are doing it and pretending it doesn't happen is not fine.
So yeah, unless you care about handling, feel, or visibility, new cars are better.
Visibility depends on the particular car. There have always been cars with good and with bad visibility. The 1976 Chevy Impala I drove in high school definitely did not have good visibility (or handling, or fuel economy, or acceleration, or comfort). The safety features of newer cars are a consideration but visibility and safety are not mutually exclusive and never have been. Not to mention that new cars have cameras, sensors and other safety features to provide situational awareness not dreamed of by cars from back in the day.
As for handling, the argument that old cars handle better is quite simply nonsense unsupported by any evidence. As a general proposition, new cars handle better in pretty much every measurable way, even allowing for their generally heavier curb weights as long as you compare vehicles in similar categories. (no comparing a 1976 Ferrari to a 2010 half ton pickup)
The price of gold is what people are willing to pay for it and gold has an intrinsic value due to the fact is is a relatively rare, useful metal.
That is true of literally every asset. Neither gold nor bitcoin are special in that regard. You are stating the obvious. Furthermore do you actually know what the term intrinsic value means? It is value determined through fundamental analysis disconnected from its market value. Usually this is calculated by doing a present value calculation of all future income from the asset. Gold is a metal and as such has no intrinsic value any more than does a hunk of quartz. If has no ability to generate future income on its own unlike a company or a person which does. Do not confuse intrinsic value with historical value or utilitarian value. Gold has both of those. Gold also has a market value which is what people are willing to pay for it.
However some people believe gold to have intrinsic value based on the ideas you outlined. By that standard bitcoin has intrinsic value as well. Any intrinsic value of bitcoin is based on its rarity (finite amount available) and the energy utilized to create it and its utility in facilitating transactions. Basically if gold has intrinsic value then so does bitcoin. If gold does not, neither does bitcoin. Either way intrinsic value has no relationship to whether or not those assets are rationally priced in the market.
The price of bitcoin is what people are willing to pay for it but bitcoin has no intrinsic value because it is nothing but electronic 1s and 0s that can't be used for anything besides being a bitcoin.
The argument you are making is called the efficient market hypothesis, specifically the strong form. Why this is rarely actually seen in the real world is undergrad economics 101 stuff. For it to be true you are arguing that decision makers (people) are rational and that there are no information asymmetries which is demonstrably not true. It also seems you aren't aware of the winner's curse phenomena. Basically the argument that markets are always correct and rational is clearly bunk and it's pretty clear that pricing on bitcoin isn't currently rational either. It's merely the latest in a long line of tulip crazes.
Nobody can die from this? What about all those workstations and computers in hospitals that run Intel.
What about them? The odds of this flaw actually resulting in a patient fatality are vanishingly small and there have been ZERO proven instances of harm to any patient of any kind. Compare with numerous known and proven fatalities from Takata airbags. Don't get me wrong, if patients actually are harmed by this it makes it a whole different ballgame but that's simply not what has happened here. You are reaching for hypothetical failure modes that haven't been shown to exist in the real world.
This is another reason I grow weary of replacing humans with computers. We are dumbing down ourselves and allowing computers to take over every task we deem as mundain.
An idiotic argument if I ever heard one. If you think computers and automation are a bad thing, I'd suggest slashdot isn't the place for you to hang out. Go find some Amish people to commiserate with.
If the price of a transaction goes up, that would bring the price of bitcoin down (makes it more expensive to use, and therefore worth less).
If bitcoin were rationally priced that would be true. But bitcoin is a very long way away from being rationally priced. Right now it's a speculative bubble and the "value" of a bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) has become untethered from sanity therefore the normal rules of supply and demand are temporarily suspended.
When it launched, Facebook described M as a "beta" and suggested the human-powered assistant would come to more users over time. But it never did. Upon shutting down the human-powered M, Facebook described it as an "experiment."
So something that barely anyone knew about and fewer actually got to use is being shut down without ever being widely rolled out? I'm not really sure why I should care...
How is this different (aside from magnitude/number of units sold) from Takata's airbag recall?
Nobody is going to die from this mistake. Pretty big and important difference there. Product defects that result in actual provable fatalities tend to get a lot more scrutiny.
I suspect a recall this large would bankrupt Intel, much like the airbag recall is bankrupting Takata.
Won't happen and while this is a serious issue, it isn't THAT serious. I expect Intel will pay some cash to settle some class action lawsuits (and so will some other chipmakers) but that's probably about as far as it will go unless there are revelations we haven't heard yet.
If Intel are not going to supply paid replacements at reasonable cost, then I expect them to be forced to supply for free all necessary info to anyone else who wishes to make and sell replacements to me on pain of jailing every single shareholder.
You were being more or less reasonable up until that last sentence. Then you took a sharp left towards Crazytown. Intel isn't going to be forced to give up their trade secrets or intellectual property and their shareholders certainly aren't going to jail because you are having a temper tantrum. They aren't going to replace every processor made in the last 20 years nor are they going to even try because it would be impossible. At most you might get a small financial settlement through a class action suit. That's reality and I suggest you start dealing with it.
If they are not willing to co-operate with their customers in producing an equitable fix, the whole lot of them are guilty of unjust enrichment, obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception, fraud, conspiracy to defraud, and anything else a bunch of greedy corporate lawyers can invent.
There is absolutely no evidence that fraud was involved because there was no evidence of intent to deceive. It was to all appearances an honest (albeit serious) error. Therefore by definition it isn't fraud,deception or any of the other words you so casually tossed out there. They may have some product liability but it isn't going to result in jail time for anyone unless there is information we don't yet know.
If Intel goes bust as a result of this, we can expect the official receiver to sell off the patents to someone who will sell us cheaper and more reliable processors (probably not Cyrix).
Intel isn't going anywhere. If companies like VW and BP don't get the death penalty for actual provable fraud, Intel certainly isn't going to see much more than a slap on the wrist.
When a currency can quickly gain or lose half it's value with no apparent reason and no apparent cause, many people won't want to take them for fear they will lose money on the deal.
The cause of the volatility is obvious. Fear Of Missing Out combined with greed which is what drives most asset bubbles.
Microsoft ultimately has to convert all transactions to dollars for financial reporting. They hold many currencies (global company) but it's a bad idea to hold particularly volatile ones since they will have to convert those to dollars at least on their financial reporting statements. They can take the risk since in reality bitcoin is basically a rounding error to them but they aren't going to take a loss on it either.
From a big picture perspective, the making of the hardware has already been detached from the design of the system.
Doesn't matter. You still have to make it and that still will cost money. Doesn't matter if you make it in house or if you hire someone else to do it. If doesn't matter if you have the secret formula for Coke, you still have to put sugar water in bottles and ship it somewhere which is expensive. It's FAR harder to bootstrap the funding for an open source hardware design than open source software.
Would a manufacturer take the risk of making a huge investment that relies on Open Source designs? They already do. Most mobile phones are entirely worthless without Android, an Open Source software.
You're conflating issues. You can already send an open source chip design to a chip fab or a hardware design to a contract manufacturer. My day job is general manager of a contract manufacturer (wire harnesses) so I'm more than passingly familiar. But just because you have outsourced production doesn't mean that the costs for it go away. Your analogy to Android is a meaningless one here.
Just because someone else makes it doesn't make the patent swamp go away. Open source software works precisely because how copyright law is written. The GPL and every other license basically only works because of copyright law. That doesn't apply to hardware. To protect hardware designs you have to get patents on the design and that costs serious money. Not only that you have to avoid infringing other companies patents which is not a trivial exercise when companies like IBM, Google, Apple, etc are getting thousands of new ones every year.
Companies that rely heavily on open source software can do so because they have an alternative revenue source. Typically service or engineering - sometimes ads. What is the alternative revenue source for open hardware? Service? Maybe but the revenue streams aren't quite as clear for open hardware. And even if they become clear it still doesn't solve the capital costs and patent issues.
I'm not saying it's impossible but it definitely will be difficult for open hardware to achieve the sort of success we've seen with open software.
Everyone running an intel CPU will suddenly discover that they have 5-30% less processor than they paid for.
Untrue. The hardware is unchanged and can run exactly as fast as it always did. Security updates and software slow machines all the time. You'll have to credibly explain why this case requires special consideration. Easy to claim here but not so easy in front of a judge. Frankly most people aren't even going to notice and the few that do notice are going to be corner cases, mostly in large corporations with adequate resources to deal with the problem. From a 10,000 foot view it's not clear why this is meaningfully different than any other serious malware incident. It's not as if it is the first time a flaw has been taken advantage of in hardware.
In many cases, that difference would have resulted in going with the AMD processor. That is a real economic harm that deserves compensation.
I'm afraid it's not nearly that easy. Product liability is a funny thing. First off there is not likely any strict liability here so there is no automatic requirement for compensation. Second, there is unlikely to be any physical danger to anyone. Third, while there is a cost to dealing with the issue it isn't clear that the cost is out of line with other serious security issues including malware. Finally, you still haven't shown the economic harm. I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here just to illustrate the challenges here. In principle I agree with you but the law very likely may not agree with us.
Of course, when Linux was new the argument was that an OS was just too big for a bunch of Free Software fans to manage.
You are making a false equivalency here. Making and distributing software is COMPLETELY different than making and distributing hardware. The economics could not be more dissimilar. The legal protections (patents vs copyright) are different. The amount of up front capital required is different. You can modify software after it has been release but you cannot do that with (most) hardware. Basically just because it worked out well for software is does not mean it will work out well for hardware. Hope for the best of course but it's likely to be a difficult nut to crack.
Only a big corporate structure could support development of anything as complex as an OS.
Ultimately that turned out to be true. Basically all the developers of linux and most other major OSS projects are employed at large tech firms (and a few large foundations) and are paid to maintain them. It isn't a bunch of hobbyists in their garages.
Open hardware is harder, but probably not impossible.
Not impossible but for non-trivial applications it appears pretty close to it. The obstacles are predominately economic ones and some legal ones and they aren't minor obstacles. I'm not about to hold my breath for patent reform anytime soon and the patent swamp is a real problem. And the economics of making and distributing hardware are immutable. I think Open Hardware is a very worthy goal but it's going to be quite the challenge.
If it wasn't tricky to pull off then it would have already been done on a wide scale. I'm not saying it's impossible but it is going to be a much tougher nut to crack than open software. Mostly for economic reasons rather than technical ones.
- Research and make use of expired patents extensively, file new ones defensively.
Who is going to do this? Who has the funding and more importantly the incentive to do this? IBM received 8000 patents in 2016 and numerous other tech companies received thousands more each. Exactly how do you plan to match that sort of pace? How do you plan to produce anything really useful without infringing on a pile of those patents? Not to mention fending off the flesh eating lawyers that give those patents teeth...
It's more capital intensive than software, but it's also not that expensive either.
I'm a certified accountant and an industrial engineer. I do cost accounting for a living. It is a LOT more expensive than software no matter how clever you are. There is a reason gross margins in manufacturing hardware are far thinner than in software. You don't escape these costs by just doing design either. Someone eventually has to make the product and that will require substantial capital. Then you have the cost of distributing the product. Unlike software which can be sent across the net for nearly free, hardware has to be shipped, stored and turned into products, all of which cost non trivial amounts of cash. If you think it isn't substantially more expensive than making and distributing software you haven't done the math.
When you look at the actual affected processors vs. the number of people who will actually get off their ass and make a claim to have a processor replaced for free, it becomes very clear how affordable this really is.
A good point but not as good as you make it seem. Quite a lot of affected chips are not user serviceable for reasons such as being soldered to the board. This means that it isn't a simple matter of sending a customer a new chip. In many cases the boards in question won't be available for any price so the most a chipmaker could do would be to pay for a replacement. A repair simply isn't going to be an option in many cases.
But you are right, 99.99999% of people will probably have forgotten about this in a week and the only people concerned about it are the 5 or so of us who still read slashdot. Most people won't have even heard about the problem and most of those who do wouldn't know how to deal with it anyway. Basically it will go away when the current generation of PCs is retired in a few years.
Open Hardware doesn't fix problems in silicon that has already been manufactured. It might help with the next generation but it won't prevent bugs from appearing in the first place.
Bear in mind that the reason Open Source software works so well is that the marginal cost of (re)production is close to zero and that there are (comparatively) minimal capital costs. Really you just need a PC and a lot of time. Open Hardware is a worthy goal but it's going to be a LOT trickier to pull off in the real world for mostly economic reasons. Furthermore hardware isn't protected by copyright for the most part. It's protected by patents and those are expensive. Worse once someone has one on a piece of kit they can basically shut down any open hardware that uses that idea for the next 20 years.
"It is a scandal, and I want repaired processors for free."
And I want a pet unicorn. Come to think of it, unicorns are about as real a thing as a "repaired processor" since they physically cannot be repaired. He wants a replacement processor which almost certainly is never going to happen. Basically he's asking for every processor produced in the last 20 years to be replaced for free. If you think that's realistic I've got a bridge to sell you.
There will be plenty of legal action over this and the results of that will be the full extend of any compensation. Furthermore to get compensation he will have to show actual harm incurred. Simple fact is that at least so far there has been little to no tangible harm from this problem to date so standing will be an issue for anyone who sues. This might change in the coming months/years but until it does the chip makers aren't going to pay a dime to replace anyone's chip - flawed or otherwise.
And the pipe providers need to be regulated to a similar degree as the electric companies to ensure fair and non-discriminatory access at rational prices even to rural areas.
You forgot about free ponies for everyone.
Save your snark. We subsidize rural access to phone service because it is important and have for decades. We should do the same for internet access and I don't mean dial up.
Broadband by whatever definition you choose is really cool to have, but in no way shape form or fashion approaches a basic need.
To most people it is more of a need in today's world than phone service is and phone service is FAR more regulated. Internet service is a utility of national importance and should be regulated as such.
Growing up in a tech-heavy bubble doubtless makes it hard to comprehend how much of society gets along just fine without it.
Well since I'm old enough to pre-date the internet and FAR older than the web I think I have a better handle on what life is like without internet access than most of the people reading this. While it's perfectly possible to get by without internet service, I don't buy the argument that it isn't a utility of the same importance as phone or mail and just a step behind electricity. It's certainly more important than Cable TV.
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No one has ever been denied the ability to associate with members of their own party.
Not sure what point you are trying to make but you certainly missed the one in the discussion. Gerrymandering utilizes the association with a political party to remove the power of their vote by rigging the system. So if Party A draws the districts to favor Party A then members of Party B are being disenfranchised as a result. Members of Party B are effectively being deprived of their vote because their vote will not matter in the outcome of the election. The fact that they actually cast a ballot does not change the fact that their vote won't have any chance to affect the outcome because the electorate has been rigged.
That's because you didn't understand the argument.
Disagreeing does not mean I didn't understand the argument but thanks for the condescension.
The cars themselves from 20 years ago were mechanically the equal of cars today, power output aside.
I'm an automotive engineer with 20 years in the industry and run a company that makes parts for car companies. That argument is simply not true. Pick any measure you want and any automotive engineer worth their salary can show you how cars today have overall improved on cars from 20 years ago. Reliability, performance, power, traction, safety, durability, handling, materials, etc. It doesn't matter - cars today have as a whole improved across the board even in the fact of additional complexity. Your argument that cars haven't improved mechanically in the last 20 years is easily shown to be false as a general proposition.
If you want to argue that we are into diminishing returns on the improvement in cars then I can probably get on board with a reasonable argument to that effect. But claims that car mechanicals peaked in the 1990s and have gone no where since is just preposterous.
Anyway, back on topic; the cars of 20 and even 25 years ago had all of the important things we demand from cars, like being able to go over bumps gracefully, but none of the things we didn't, like remotely compromisable infotainment systems.
Saying cars 20 years ago could go over bumps adequately is true but it's false to say cars today don't do it any better. To argue otherwise is to claim that tens of thousands of automotive engineers have wasted their time for the last 20 years.
Therein lies the rub: If vehicles have become substantially heavier, and tires have only gotten a little wider, then handling is actually compromised
The width of tires is not remotely the only consideration. What tires are made of matters FAR more and that has improved. Furthermore, there is a lot more to handling than simply the tires. A car can be heavier and have better handling. While weight does play an important role, it isn't even close to the only factor that matters. Handling is a function of the sum of the parts and there is more than one equation to get it right.
People love the BRZ because it returns to that lightweight formula. The new Miata could have had more power, but that would have made it heavier.
Seriously? You're using a 2 seat sports car as an example of why all cars are no better than ones from 20 years ago? People love the BRZ and Miata because it's a fun and inexpensive little sports car for people who want fun and inexpensive little sports cars that drive well. Not everyone wants that and it's inappropriate to extrapolate that market segment to cars in general. It's one way to get a great handling car but not the only way. Good handling can be achieved in many ways. You'd be daft to argue that a Corvette or a BMW M4 doesn't handle well but light weight wasn't the primary goal of those cars. The lightweight sports car is merely one way to get excellent handling and not the only way. But even staying with the example you provided the Miata of today is measurably better than the one from 20 years ago.
Democrats won in nine of the 10 most-gerrymandered districts. But eight out of 10 of those districts were drawn by Republicans.
That's because of a tactic called "packing" whereby you try to concentrate the opposition into the fewest districts possible. The other major tactic is "cracking" which dilutes the voting power of the opposition across multiple districts. So it wouldn't be shocking at all to find a highly gerrymandered district drawn by the losing party. They do that so that they can win more seats elsewhere.
And this doesn't.
What color is the sky on your planet where gerrymandering doesn't matter?
Why not simply add up all the votes over the entire population of interest ?
The problem is in how you define the entire population of interest. Gerrymandering is the act of politicians (or political parties) having the power to choose the population that is most likely to ensure they get elected.
The intent to disenfranchise is not even alleged in TFA, much less proven.
Gerrymandering by definition disenfranchises some group of people. If gerrymandering occurs then it is proven and the court found that it had occurred in this case so it is proven in the legal sense as well. Since gerrymandering doesn't occur by accident then it has to be intended. Whenever you make someone's vote effectively meaningless that is the very definition of disenfranchisement.
Bollocks
What an eloquent rebuttal. Full of facts and logic. I bow to your debating prowess.
You could get all that stuff on cars before, or swap it on. And it was common to do so.
Your argument is that because we could tune a car to perform better that cars from 20 years ago are the equal of those today? Dumbest argument I've heard in quite a while.
Cheapness is a thing. A-pillars have grown and making them small and still having rollover resistance is expensive.
Of course cost is a consideration and a crude design will typically be cheaper than an expensive one. However thick A pillars do not necessarily make for bad visibility if they are shaped cleverly and even if they did would you prefer a car that turns into crumpled aluminum foil in the event of a rollover?
Raw, unassisted handling peaked in the 1990s, when suspension geometry technology reached essentially the point we've reached today, but when vehicles were lighter.
Even if I accept your premise about "raw unassisted handling peaking" (which I do not) that doesn't mean handling has degraded since then. It's pretty clear that handling has improved quite a lot in the last 20 years. You don't have to take my word for it either - cars from the 90s are still on the road. It's not even a contest. Furthermore there is a LOT more to handling than suspension geometry and I disagree that suspension technology hasn't improved in the last 20 year either.
If you have a complaint, complain that the battery wasn't designed to last longer.
That's not the problem. The problem was that they didn't tell anyone they were doing it. Had they been up front about this behavior, people could have evaluated whether they cared or not (most probably wouldn't care) and made their purchasing decision accordingly. But instead Apple tried to pull a fast one and now that is biting them in the ass.
Them slowing down the device for a reasonable technical problem is fine. Not telling anyone they are doing it and pretending it doesn't happen is not fine.
So yeah, unless you care about handling, feel, or visibility, new cars are better.
Visibility depends on the particular car. There have always been cars with good and with bad visibility. The 1976 Chevy Impala I drove in high school definitely did not have good visibility (or handling, or fuel economy, or acceleration, or comfort). The safety features of newer cars are a consideration but visibility and safety are not mutually exclusive and never have been. Not to mention that new cars have cameras, sensors and other safety features to provide situational awareness not dreamed of by cars from back in the day.
As for handling, the argument that old cars handle better is quite simply nonsense unsupported by any evidence. As a general proposition, new cars handle better in pretty much every measurable way, even allowing for their generally heavier curb weights as long as you compare vehicles in similar categories. (no comparing a 1976 Ferrari to a 2010 half ton pickup)
The price of gold is what people are willing to pay for it and gold has an intrinsic value due to the fact is is a relatively rare, useful metal.
That is true of literally every asset. Neither gold nor bitcoin are special in that regard. You are stating the obvious. Furthermore do you actually know what the term intrinsic value means? It is value determined through fundamental analysis disconnected from its market value. Usually this is calculated by doing a present value calculation of all future income from the asset. Gold is a metal and as such has no intrinsic value any more than does a hunk of quartz. If has no ability to generate future income on its own unlike a company or a person which does. Do not confuse intrinsic value with historical value or utilitarian value. Gold has both of those. Gold also has a market value which is what people are willing to pay for it.
However some people believe gold to have intrinsic value based on the ideas you outlined. By that standard bitcoin has intrinsic value as well. Any intrinsic value of bitcoin is based on its rarity (finite amount available) and the energy utilized to create it and its utility in facilitating transactions. Basically if gold has intrinsic value then so does bitcoin. If gold does not, neither does bitcoin. Either way intrinsic value has no relationship to whether or not those assets are rationally priced in the market.
The price of bitcoin is what people are willing to pay for it but bitcoin has no intrinsic value because it is nothing but electronic 1s and 0s that can't be used for anything besides being a bitcoin.
The argument you are making is called the efficient market hypothesis, specifically the strong form. Why this is rarely actually seen in the real world is undergrad economics 101 stuff. For it to be true you are arguing that decision makers (people) are rational and that there are no information asymmetries which is demonstrably not true. It also seems you aren't aware of the winner's curse phenomena. Basically the argument that markets are always correct and rational is clearly bunk and it's pretty clear that pricing on bitcoin isn't currently rational either. It's merely the latest in a long line of tulip crazes.
Nobody can die from this? What about all those workstations and computers in hospitals that run Intel.
What about them? The odds of this flaw actually resulting in a patient fatality are vanishingly small and there have been ZERO proven instances of harm to any patient of any kind. Compare with numerous known and proven fatalities from Takata airbags. Don't get me wrong, if patients actually are harmed by this it makes it a whole different ballgame but that's simply not what has happened here. You are reaching for hypothetical failure modes that haven't been shown to exist in the real world.
This is another reason I grow weary of replacing humans with computers. We are dumbing down ourselves and allowing computers to take over every task we deem as mundain.
An idiotic argument if I ever heard one. If you think computers and automation are a bad thing, I'd suggest slashdot isn't the place for you to hang out. Go find some Amish people to commiserate with.
If the price of a transaction goes up, that would bring the price of bitcoin down (makes it more expensive to use, and therefore worth less).
If bitcoin were rationally priced that would be true. But bitcoin is a very long way away from being rationally priced. Right now it's a speculative bubble and the "value" of a bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) has become untethered from sanity therefore the normal rules of supply and demand are temporarily suspended.
When it launched, Facebook described M as a "beta" and suggested the human-powered assistant would come to more users over time. But it never did. Upon shutting down the human-powered M, Facebook described it as an "experiment."
So something that barely anyone knew about and fewer actually got to use is being shut down without ever being widely rolled out? I'm not really sure why I should care...
Slow news day I guess.
How is this different (aside from magnitude/number of units sold) from Takata's airbag recall?
Nobody is going to die from this mistake. Pretty big and important difference there. Product defects that result in actual provable fatalities tend to get a lot more scrutiny.
I suspect a recall this large would bankrupt Intel, much like the airbag recall is bankrupting Takata.
Won't happen and while this is a serious issue, it isn't THAT serious. I expect Intel will pay some cash to settle some class action lawsuits (and so will some other chipmakers) but that's probably about as far as it will go unless there are revelations we haven't heard yet.
If Intel are not going to supply paid replacements at reasonable cost, then I expect them to be forced to supply for free all necessary info to anyone else who wishes to make and sell replacements to me on pain of jailing every single shareholder.
You were being more or less reasonable up until that last sentence. Then you took a sharp left towards Crazytown. Intel isn't going to be forced to give up their trade secrets or intellectual property and their shareholders certainly aren't going to jail because you are having a temper tantrum. They aren't going to replace every processor made in the last 20 years nor are they going to even try because it would be impossible. At most you might get a small financial settlement through a class action suit. That's reality and I suggest you start dealing with it.
If they are not willing to co-operate with their customers in producing an equitable fix, the whole lot of them are guilty of unjust enrichment, obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception, fraud, conspiracy to defraud, and anything else a bunch of greedy corporate lawyers can invent.
There is absolutely no evidence that fraud was involved because there was no evidence of intent to deceive. It was to all appearances an honest (albeit serious) error. Therefore by definition it isn't fraud,deception or any of the other words you so casually tossed out there. They may have some product liability but it isn't going to result in jail time for anyone unless there is information we don't yet know.
If Intel goes bust as a result of this, we can expect the official receiver to sell off the patents to someone who will sell us cheaper and more reliable processors (probably not Cyrix).
Intel isn't going anywhere. If companies like VW and BP don't get the death penalty for actual provable fraud, Intel certainly isn't going to see much more than a slap on the wrist.
When a currency can quickly gain or lose half it's value with no apparent reason and no apparent cause, many people won't want to take them for fear they will lose money on the deal.
The cause of the volatility is obvious. Fear Of Missing Out combined with greed which is what drives most asset bubbles.
Microsoft ultimately has to convert all transactions to dollars for financial reporting. They hold many currencies (global company) but it's a bad idea to hold particularly volatile ones since they will have to convert those to dollars at least on their financial reporting statements. They can take the risk since in reality bitcoin is basically a rounding error to them but they aren't going to take a loss on it either.
From a big picture perspective, the making of the hardware has already been detached from the design of the system.
Doesn't matter. You still have to make it and that still will cost money. Doesn't matter if you make it in house or if you hire someone else to do it. If doesn't matter if you have the secret formula for Coke, you still have to put sugar water in bottles and ship it somewhere which is expensive. It's FAR harder to bootstrap the funding for an open source hardware design than open source software.
Would a manufacturer take the risk of making a huge investment that relies on Open Source designs? They already do. Most mobile phones are entirely worthless without Android, an Open Source software.
You're conflating issues. You can already send an open source chip design to a chip fab or a hardware design to a contract manufacturer. My day job is general manager of a contract manufacturer (wire harnesses) so I'm more than passingly familiar. But just because you have outsourced production doesn't mean that the costs for it go away. Your analogy to Android is a meaningless one here.
Just because someone else makes it doesn't make the patent swamp go away. Open source software works precisely because how copyright law is written. The GPL and every other license basically only works because of copyright law. That doesn't apply to hardware. To protect hardware designs you have to get patents on the design and that costs serious money. Not only that you have to avoid infringing other companies patents which is not a trivial exercise when companies like IBM, Google, Apple, etc are getting thousands of new ones every year.
Companies that rely heavily on open source software can do so because they have an alternative revenue source. Typically service or engineering - sometimes ads. What is the alternative revenue source for open hardware? Service? Maybe but the revenue streams aren't quite as clear for open hardware. And even if they become clear it still doesn't solve the capital costs and patent issues.
I'm not saying it's impossible but it definitely will be difficult for open hardware to achieve the sort of success we've seen with open software.
Everyone running an intel CPU will suddenly discover that they have 5-30% less processor than they paid for.
Untrue. The hardware is unchanged and can run exactly as fast as it always did. Security updates and software slow machines all the time. You'll have to credibly explain why this case requires special consideration. Easy to claim here but not so easy in front of a judge. Frankly most people aren't even going to notice and the few that do notice are going to be corner cases, mostly in large corporations with adequate resources to deal with the problem. From a 10,000 foot view it's not clear why this is meaningfully different than any other serious malware incident. It's not as if it is the first time a flaw has been taken advantage of in hardware.
In many cases, that difference would have resulted in going with the AMD processor. That is a real economic harm that deserves compensation.
I'm afraid it's not nearly that easy. Product liability is a funny thing. First off there is not likely any strict liability here so there is no automatic requirement for compensation. Second, there is unlikely to be any physical danger to anyone. Third, while there is a cost to dealing with the issue it isn't clear that the cost is out of line with other serious security issues including malware. Finally, you still haven't shown the economic harm. I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here just to illustrate the challenges here. In principle I agree with you but the law very likely may not agree with us.
Of course, when Linux was new the argument was that an OS was just too big for a bunch of Free Software fans to manage.
You are making a false equivalency here. Making and distributing software is COMPLETELY different than making and distributing hardware. The economics could not be more dissimilar. The legal protections (patents vs copyright) are different. The amount of up front capital required is different. You can modify software after it has been release but you cannot do that with (most) hardware. Basically just because it worked out well for software is does not mean it will work out well for hardware. Hope for the best of course but it's likely to be a difficult nut to crack.
Only a big corporate structure could support development of anything as complex as an OS.
Ultimately that turned out to be true. Basically all the developers of linux and most other major OSS projects are employed at large tech firms (and a few large foundations) and are paid to maintain them. It isn't a bunch of hobbyists in their garages.
Open hardware is harder, but probably not impossible.
Not impossible but for non-trivial applications it appears pretty close to it. The obstacles are predominately economic ones and some legal ones and they aren't minor obstacles. I'm not about to hold my breath for patent reform anytime soon and the patent swamp is a real problem. And the economics of making and distributing hardware are immutable. I think Open Hardware is a very worthy goal but it's going to be quite the challenge.
No, it's not tricky to pull off.
If it wasn't tricky to pull off then it would have already been done on a wide scale. I'm not saying it's impossible but it is going to be a much tougher nut to crack than open software. Mostly for economic reasons rather than technical ones.
- Research and make use of expired patents extensively, file new ones defensively.
Who is going to do this? Who has the funding and more importantly the incentive to do this? IBM received 8000 patents in 2016 and numerous other tech companies received thousands more each. Exactly how do you plan to match that sort of pace? How do you plan to produce anything really useful without infringing on a pile of those patents? Not to mention fending off the flesh eating lawyers that give those patents teeth...
It's more capital intensive than software, but it's also not that expensive either.
I'm a certified accountant and an industrial engineer. I do cost accounting for a living. It is a LOT more expensive than software no matter how clever you are. There is a reason gross margins in manufacturing hardware are far thinner than in software. You don't escape these costs by just doing design either. Someone eventually has to make the product and that will require substantial capital. Then you have the cost of distributing the product. Unlike software which can be sent across the net for nearly free, hardware has to be shipped, stored and turned into products, all of which cost non trivial amounts of cash. If you think it isn't substantially more expensive than making and distributing software you haven't done the math.
When you look at the actual affected processors vs. the number of people who will actually get off their ass and make a claim to have a processor replaced for free, it becomes very clear how affordable this really is.
A good point but not as good as you make it seem. Quite a lot of affected chips are not user serviceable for reasons such as being soldered to the board. This means that it isn't a simple matter of sending a customer a new chip. In many cases the boards in question won't be available for any price so the most a chipmaker could do would be to pay for a replacement. A repair simply isn't going to be an option in many cases.
But you are right, 99.99999% of people will probably have forgotten about this in a week and the only people concerned about it are the 5 or so of us who still read slashdot. Most people won't have even heard about the problem and most of those who do wouldn't know how to deal with it anyway. Basically it will go away when the current generation of PCs is retired in a few years.
Open Hardware doesn't fix problems in silicon that has already been manufactured. It might help with the next generation but it won't prevent bugs from appearing in the first place.
Bear in mind that the reason Open Source software works so well is that the marginal cost of (re)production is close to zero and that there are (comparatively) minimal capital costs. Really you just need a PC and a lot of time. Open Hardware is a worthy goal but it's going to be a LOT trickier to pull off in the real world for mostly economic reasons. Furthermore hardware isn't protected by copyright for the most part. It's protected by patents and those are expensive. Worse once someone has one on a piece of kit they can basically shut down any open hardware that uses that idea for the next 20 years.
"It is a scandal, and I want repaired processors for free."
And I want a pet unicorn. Come to think of it, unicorns are about as real a thing as a "repaired processor" since they physically cannot be repaired. He wants a replacement processor which almost certainly is never going to happen. Basically he's asking for every processor produced in the last 20 years to be replaced for free. If you think that's realistic I've got a bridge to sell you.
There will be plenty of legal action over this and the results of that will be the full extend of any compensation. Furthermore to get compensation he will have to show actual harm incurred. Simple fact is that at least so far there has been little to no tangible harm from this problem to date so standing will be an issue for anyone who sues. This might change in the coming months/years but until it does the chip makers aren't going to pay a dime to replace anyone's chip - flawed or otherwise.
And the pipe providers need to be regulated to a similar degree as the electric companies to ensure fair and non-discriminatory access at rational prices even to rural areas.
You forgot about free ponies for everyone.
Save your snark. We subsidize rural access to phone service because it is important and have for decades. We should do the same for internet access and I don't mean dial up.
Broadband by whatever definition you choose is really cool to have, but in no way shape form or fashion approaches a basic need.
To most people it is more of a need in today's world than phone service is and phone service is FAR more regulated. Internet service is a utility of national importance and should be regulated as such.
Growing up in a tech-heavy bubble doubtless makes it hard to comprehend how much of society gets along just fine without it.
Well since I'm old enough to pre-date the internet and FAR older than the web I think I have a better handle on what life is like without internet access than most of the people reading this. While it's perfectly possible to get by without internet service, I don't buy the argument that it isn't a utility of the same importance as phone or mail and just a step behind electricity. It's certainly more important than Cable TV.