I'm skeptical about human drivers, including myself. I welcome the safer and less congested roads that we will have when driverless cars take over and we ban human driving.
Until recently, Intel's best mainstream desktop CPU had four cores, and their best mainstream laptop CPU had two. (By "mainstream laptop" I mean the U series ultra-low-voltage parts, not the more power hungry H series that are used in gaming and workstation laptops.) They moved up the release date of the Coffee Lake aka 8000 series (six core desktop CPUs and four core U series laptop CPUs) as a response to the competitive threat from AMD.
Intel still has the edge in performance per core. Ryzen narrowed the gap considerably compared to AMD's previous FX series. Ryzen gives you more cores per dollar to make up for the remaining gap. Ryzen killed Kaby Lake in multi-threaded applications, but Coffee Lake is competitive there and retains its edge in single-thread applications.
AMD will release a minor update to Ryzen in 2018; that will likely include clock increases and some slight tweaks to improve IPC. Their next significant architecture change (Zen 2, aka Matisse) isn't expected until 2019; it will also include a shift to a new 7nm process.
This problem could cost Intel a LOT more money. There is a much larger number of affected CPUs; it's just about everything they make rather than just a small part of their production, and the market has also grown in the intervening years.
There is also the labor cost of replacing the CPUs. The Pentium problem only affected desktop CPUs and that was back when they were fairly easy to change, so Intel could just mail out the parts and expect users to install them. Now a lot of the systems are laptops with CPUs that are soldered to the motherboard; it takes specialized equipment to replace those, and laptops are a lot harder to take apart than desktop systems are.
Finally, it's likely that a much larger percentage of the affected systems would get repaired. The FDIV bug didn't have any effect on the vast majority of computer users; fixing it was really only important to people who were doing scientific computing or serious mathematical analysis. Computer security is an issue for EVERYBODY.
Low end embedded processors (including the ARM Cortex-M series) don't do speculative execution, so there should be no vulnerability. Nor does the low end of the Cortex-A series. Unless you're embedding high end ARM processors you're safe for now.
All hybrid cars that I know of can be bought. 50 state EVs (Tesla, Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt) can also be bought. Some of the compliance EVs that companies sell only in limited areas (states like California that have zero emissions vehicle mandates) are lease-only.
Famously, the Chevrolet EV1, the subject of the documentary Who Killed The Electric Car?, was only leased. GM withdrew that car from the market after a few years, and refused to allow the lessees to buy the cars or continue to lease them.
EVs don't actually depreciate as badly as the numbers suggest. For example, that Leaf that cost $30,000 new and now can be bought for $10,000. Because of the federal and state tax benefits when it was bought, it really cost $20,000 new (even less in Colorado), not $30,000. When you measure depreciation you have to start with the REAL price paid, not the sticker price.
The same argument sometimes applies to gas-powered cars that had large rebates offered to buyers. Rebates of $5,000 or more have happened, and those big rebates mean that those vehicles are likely to be worth less on the used market.
You live in a place where you don't have to drive to work. So do I. Not everybody does. It's an awesome thing if you can make it happen but it's not feasible for everybody.
There is currently a $7,500 federal tax credit on EVs. But it's a non-refundable credit; you have to actually owe $7,500 or more in taxes to get the full benefit. There are people who can afford an EV who do not pay that much tax, including people with large itemized deductions. And it's even more likely to apply to seniors; they get a larger standard deduction (two of those for a married couple), their housing expenses are often low because they live in fully paid off houses, and their Social Security income may be non-taxable (it depends on total income). If those people lease an EV the leasing company gets the full tax credit even if the driver would not if they bought the car, and that credit is then reflected in lower lease payments.
That's just the federal picture. Some states also offer tax credits for EVs where the same consideration may apply. Others give EV rebates that you get regardless of tax liability. And in a few of the rebate states the rebate goes to the driver even if you lease; California and Massachusetts are two such states.
The tablet market is shrinking. What there is of it is almost entirely Apple, Samsung, and Amazon. (A Fire HD8 or HD10 with Google Play sideloaded is a quite functional tablet. They're lower end than a lot of the people commenting here have in mind but the price is certainly right.) There just aren't enough customers out there for anybody else to bother; Lenovo is the only other major company that is still trying.
The specific provision in question is the elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes. People are paying their 2018 property tax now so they can deduct it, which they won't be able to do on next year's return. Given that change in the tax code, paying the bill now rather than next month is sensible.
For many people who are affected by that change and by the reduction of the deduction for mortgage interest, Trump's tax plan is a tax increase, not a cut. And that's before the tax cuts for the middle class expire in a few years, unlike the tax cuts for the rich that are permanent. (Well, as permanent as anything in US law ever is, as the law can get changed again.)
In the early days of the Mormon church they were mostly the VICTIMS of violence. They were driven out of Missouri and Illinois by mob violence. And in those early days polygyny may have helped stabilize the society; the people who died in the attacks were mostly men, so there was a shortage of men in Mormon society.
The Mormons largely escaped violence after they moved to Utah, a place where they could be the majority. Eventually the gender ratio of their society returned to normal as new generations of children were born, and the main Mormon church eliminated polygyny. Some splinter groups continued the practice and still do to this day.
If Carlin was referring to the median guy, he was mathematically correct by definition: half the people in the world are less intelligent than that median guy. But intelligence is distributed in a bell curve with most of the population clustered in the center, so a lot of those less intelligent people would be only a tiny bit less intelligent, with only a relative few being a lot less intelligent. The same logic applies in the other direction: most of the people who are more intelligent than the median guy are only slightly more so.
If Carlin was referring to the hypothetical mean guy (in the mathematical sense rather than being a comment on how vicious he is), his statement isn't a tautology. But given the way intelligence is distributed in the population, it would not be far off. The bell curve observation still applies as well.
There is a third type of average, the mode, which is the most common value of a variable. There is no fully objective way to measure intelligence and the various tests that we do have produce slightly different results, so determining the mode value of intelligence is probably not meaningful. To the extent that the concept has any meaning at all, the mode is likely to be somewhere near the peak of the bell curve; there is no reason to believe that there is a large discrete spike at some other value.
The question is not whether the big studios are preventing movies from being made by others. Plenty of movies are being made. The real question is whether the big studios are using monopoly power to prevent other movies from being exhibited widely, and there is some reason to believe that is happening. Any film that is relegated to art house release will never reach a large audience.
The onslaught of ads and the expensive snacks are caused by the power of the movie studios. Theaters can't make much money selling tickets because the lion's share of that price goes to the studio, so they have to make their money in other ways.
As for the endless sequels, the studios will keep making them so long as people keep buying tickets. And that's not just us people in the US, it's also the global market. Overseas markets seem to have even more of an appetite for Yet Another Sequel than the American audience does, and less interest in original products. Contrast, for example, Get Out (30% international) with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (78%), Transformers: The Last Knight (79%), and The Fate of the Furious (82%). (For comparison, an average wide release these days runs between 50% and 65% international.) Those last three probably wouldn't have even been made if the US market were the whole story; those franchises were already showing signs of serious domestic decline before the latest installments.
And yet it was a flop. Despite critical acclaim and high viewer ratings it did a mere $23 million in US box office against a $70 million production budget. It's impossible to know what all the reasons for its financial failure were, but if theaters were refusing to give it a full range of screening times (including adult-friendly ones) that is surely part of the story.
Going cashless is a way for restaurants to keep out poor customers that they don't want sullying their doorsteps. They don't care that it's discrimination; they're doing it BECAUSE it's discrimination. Unless we pass laws prohibiting the practice the trend will continue.
Micro Center keeps unpackaged thumb drives in drawers at the checkouts. It's hard to walk off with them without paying when the cashier is right there.
On the one hand, switching to bubble envelopes instead of boxes means less packaging. On the other hand, it means replacing packaging that can be recycled with packaging that cannot be. Not sure it's a net gain.
Typing well takes a lot of practice. It's difficult at best to fake convincingly, though the actors on Mr Robot do a better job of it than the H&CF people did.
Most actors haven't learned how to type because they haven't had much incentive to. I know, not all actors; some are also serious academics who developed their typing skills for their school careers, there are some whose side job before becoming successful was as a secretary rather than the usual waitstaff jobs, and there are the geeky actors like Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton who probably do some coding themselves.
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I'm skeptical about human drivers, including myself. I welcome the safer and less congested roads that we will have when driverless cars take over and we ban human driving.
Everybody wants to rule the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Unbreakable encryption IS an urgent public safety issue. It is urgent that we have it to protect people from being hurt by the FBI.
Until recently, Intel's best mainstream desktop CPU had four cores, and their best mainstream laptop CPU had two. (By "mainstream laptop" I mean the U series ultra-low-voltage parts, not the more power hungry H series that are used in gaming and workstation laptops.) They moved up the release date of the Coffee Lake aka 8000 series (six core desktop CPUs and four core U series laptop CPUs) as a response to the competitive threat from AMD.
Intel still has the edge in performance per core. Ryzen narrowed the gap considerably compared to AMD's previous FX series. Ryzen gives you more cores per dollar to make up for the remaining gap. Ryzen killed Kaby Lake in multi-threaded applications, but Coffee Lake is competitive there and retains its edge in single-thread applications.
AMD will release a minor update to Ryzen in 2018; that will likely include clock increases and some slight tweaks to improve IPC. Their next significant architecture change (Zen 2, aka Matisse) isn't expected until 2019; it will also include a shift to a new 7nm process.
This problem could cost Intel a LOT more money. There is a much larger number of affected CPUs; it's just about everything they make rather than just a small part of their production, and the market has also grown in the intervening years.
There is also the labor cost of replacing the CPUs. The Pentium problem only affected desktop CPUs and that was back when they were fairly easy to change, so Intel could just mail out the parts and expect users to install them. Now a lot of the systems are laptops with CPUs that are soldered to the motherboard; it takes specialized equipment to replace those, and laptops are a lot harder to take apart than desktop systems are.
Finally, it's likely that a much larger percentage of the affected systems would get repaired. The FDIV bug didn't have any effect on the vast majority of computer users; fixing it was really only important to people who were doing scientific computing or serious mathematical analysis. Computer security is an issue for EVERYBODY.
The problem is that there is nothing to replace the CPU with. All current high end CPUs have some degree of vulnerability to these attacks.
Low end embedded processors (including the ARM Cortex-M series) don't do speculative execution, so there should be no vulnerability. Nor does the low end of the Cortex-A series. Unless you're embedding high end ARM processors you're safe for now.
All hybrid cars that I know of can be bought. 50 state EVs (Tesla, Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt) can also be bought. Some of the compliance EVs that companies sell only in limited areas (states like California that have zero emissions vehicle mandates) are lease-only.
Famously, the Chevrolet EV1, the subject of the documentary Who Killed The Electric Car?, was only leased. GM withdrew that car from the market after a few years, and refused to allow the lessees to buy the cars or continue to lease them.
The original CyanogenMod is dead. Try LineageOS instead: https://lineageos.org/
EVs don't actually depreciate as badly as the numbers suggest. For example, that Leaf that cost $30,000 new and now can be bought for $10,000. Because of the federal and state tax benefits when it was bought, it really cost $20,000 new (even less in Colorado), not $30,000. When you measure depreciation you have to start with the REAL price paid, not the sticker price.
The same argument sometimes applies to gas-powered cars that had large rebates offered to buyers. Rebates of $5,000 or more have happened, and those big rebates mean that those vehicles are likely to be worth less on the used market.
You live in a place where you don't have to drive to work. So do I. Not everybody does. It's an awesome thing if you can make it happen but it's not feasible for everybody.
A motorcycle doesn't work well as a full time vehicle in places that get winter. Or that frequently experience heavy rain.
There is currently a $7,500 federal tax credit on EVs. But it's a non-refundable credit; you have to actually owe $7,500 or more in taxes to get the full benefit. There are people who can afford an EV who do not pay that much tax, including people with large itemized deductions. And it's even more likely to apply to seniors; they get a larger standard deduction (two of those for a married couple), their housing expenses are often low because they live in fully paid off houses, and their Social Security income may be non-taxable (it depends on total income). If those people lease an EV the leasing company gets the full tax credit even if the driver would not if they bought the car, and that credit is then reflected in lower lease payments.
That's just the federal picture. Some states also offer tax credits for EVs where the same consideration may apply. Others give EV rebates that you get regardless of tax liability. And in a few of the rebate states the rebate goes to the driver even if you lease; California and Massachusetts are two such states.
The tablet market is shrinking. What there is of it is almost entirely Apple, Samsung, and Amazon. (A Fire HD8 or HD10 with Google Play sideloaded is a quite functional tablet. They're lower end than a lot of the people commenting here have in mind but the price is certainly right.) There just aren't enough customers out there for anybody else to bother; Lenovo is the only other major company that is still trying.
The specific provision in question is the elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes. People are paying their 2018 property tax now so they can deduct it, which they won't be able to do on next year's return. Given that change in the tax code, paying the bill now rather than next month is sensible.
For many people who are affected by that change and by the reduction of the deduction for mortgage interest, Trump's tax plan is a tax increase, not a cut. And that's before the tax cuts for the middle class expire in a few years, unlike the tax cuts for the rich that are permanent. (Well, as permanent as anything in US law ever is, as the law can get changed again.)
In the early days of the Mormon church they were mostly the VICTIMS of violence. They were driven out of Missouri and Illinois by mob violence. And in those early days polygyny may have helped stabilize the society; the people who died in the attacks were mostly men, so there was a shortage of men in Mormon society.
The Mormons largely escaped violence after they moved to Utah, a place where they could be the majority. Eventually the gender ratio of their society returned to normal as new generations of children were born, and the main Mormon church eliminated polygyny. Some splinter groups continued the practice and still do to this day.
If Carlin was referring to the median guy, he was mathematically correct by definition: half the people in the world are less intelligent than that median guy. But intelligence is distributed in a bell curve with most of the population clustered in the center, so a lot of those less intelligent people would be only a tiny bit less intelligent, with only a relative few being a lot less intelligent. The same logic applies in the other direction: most of the people who are more intelligent than the median guy are only slightly more so.
If Carlin was referring to the hypothetical mean guy (in the mathematical sense rather than being a comment on how vicious he is), his statement isn't a tautology. But given the way intelligence is distributed in the population, it would not be far off. The bell curve observation still applies as well.
There is a third type of average, the mode, which is the most common value of a variable. There is no fully objective way to measure intelligence and the various tests that we do have produce slightly different results, so determining the mode value of intelligence is probably not meaningful. To the extent that the concept has any meaning at all, the mode is likely to be somewhere near the peak of the bell curve; there is no reason to believe that there is a large discrete spike at some other value.
The question is not whether the big studios are preventing movies from being made by others. Plenty of movies are being made. The real question is whether the big studios are using monopoly power to prevent other movies from being exhibited widely, and there is some reason to believe that is happening. Any film that is relegated to art house release will never reach a large audience.
The onslaught of ads and the expensive snacks are caused by the power of the movie studios. Theaters can't make much money selling tickets because the lion's share of that price goes to the studio, so they have to make their money in other ways.
As for the endless sequels, the studios will keep making them so long as people keep buying tickets. And that's not just us people in the US, it's also the global market. Overseas markets seem to have even more of an appetite for Yet Another Sequel than the American audience does, and less interest in original products. Contrast, for example, Get Out (30% international) with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (78%), Transformers: The Last Knight (79%), and The Fate of the Furious (82%). (For comparison, an average wide release these days runs between 50% and 65% international.) Those last three probably wouldn't have even been made if the US market were the whole story; those franchises were already showing signs of serious domestic decline before the latest installments.
And yet it was a flop. Despite critical acclaim and high viewer ratings it did a mere $23 million in US box office against a $70 million production budget. It's impossible to know what all the reasons for its financial failure were, but if theaters were refusing to give it a full range of screening times (including adult-friendly ones) that is surely part of the story.
Going cashless is a way for restaurants to keep out poor customers that they don't want sullying their doorsteps. They don't care that it's discrimination; they're doing it BECAUSE it's discrimination. Unless we pass laws prohibiting the practice the trend will continue.
Micro Center keeps unpackaged thumb drives in drawers at the checkouts. It's hard to walk off with them without paying when the cashier is right there.
On the one hand, switching to bubble envelopes instead of boxes means less packaging. On the other hand, it means replacing packaging that can be recycled with packaging that cannot be. Not sure it's a net gain.
Ack!
Typing well takes a lot of practice. It's difficult at best to fake convincingly, though the actors on Mr Robot do a better job of it than the H&CF people did.
Most actors haven't learned how to type because they haven't had much incentive to. I know, not all actors; some are also serious academics who developed their typing skills for their school careers, there are some whose side job before becoming successful was as a secretary rather than the usual waitstaff jobs, and there are the geeky actors like Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton who probably do some coding themselves.