I think this is the main thing, the inertia on quality headphones using 3.5mm plugs just makes this a silly decision. Additionally, there's just a point where getting a phone thinner is just being silly. Give me better battery life over a thinner device. Problem is the industry appears to be dead set against progressing beyond a 1 day battery.
As a NSW resident, the 3D printing aspect is just one part. There has been some reporting of backyard manufacture of firearms, usually machine pistols. This legislation, doesn't just prohibit 3D printing blueprints, but also specifically prohibits blueprints for electronic milling machines as well (CNC mills).
This isn't going to change anything much at all. They didn't ban manufacture of firearms through these methods, the people who can legally manufacture firearms, are exempt from these restrictions. What is dangerous about it is that it's basically banning knowledge, to some extent. Will they ban drug recipes? What about chemistry books if they have instructions that can aid drug manufacture? The possibilties are endless, and that's where the US first amendment is such a powerful right, which few other nations have granted to their respective serfs.
Actually the legislation covers that very scenario, basically defining 'being in possession' across jurisdictions. Bottom line is, there was some media talk about 3D printed firearms, the police tried some out and put out videos of them blowing up, but after the sydney siege late last year, they couldn't let a crisis go to waste, so put out this legislation. It's just politicians trying to look like as if they're doing something, but in reality, are powerless to do anything.
To answer your question though, yes, anything can be banned here, we have almost no protected rights, so anything can be given, or taken, at the whim of parliament.
Trust me they won't get any less distraction now without Abbott, and it's because the media is running the narrative of public discourse, and the media is filled to the brim with ideologues. They're too busy spreading their doctrine on their holy trinity of refugees, gay marriage and climate change.
I just look at their coverage, when they do, of tech things, and on topics that I'm knowledgeable about, the Australian media is invariably hopelessly wrong.
I know what I said is a simplification, but it's true in the context of the real world, and not the idealised parliamentary procedure. Take voting for the greens, they're a fringe party that struggles beyond 10%, they're popularity is also amongst the wealthiest inner city class, whilst deeply unpopular among the poorest classes in Australia. Now, we don't operate strictly in a two party system, but in practice we do. Technically speaking, when our parliaments were first formed, there wasn't a concept of a political party. It was meant to be that each member operated on their own. This was unworkable, as no one could agree to anything, starting parties alleviated this and really did allow political progress. Technically speaking, the constitution still doesn't recognise or allow for political parties. It probably explains why we're having such political turmoil with so many state and federal leaders shuffled along, because there's too many competing interests going on, and no actual vision from our leaders, rather focus group driven policy.
I am extremely dissatisfied with the erosion of personal liberties in Australia. I definitely won't be voting for Labor, Coalition, nor the greens, because they all have the same authoritarian streak in them. The problem is, most people do vote within the two party system, so that's why with preferential voting system, at some point you do have to choose where your vote goes, and pick the lesser of multiple evils. The only choice I have is to either vote informal, or decide where my election funds go with my vote (your upper and lower house votes are worth >$5 in election funds so always pick your most preferred candidate first).
You're so obviously biased. Now that Abbott is gone, do you realise that the mastermind behind this policy is in charge! After all Turnbull was communications minister up until a month ago, this is his policy!
I've mentioned in a previous post though, the issue got bipartisan support, so the public have no say on this. Then the anti-Abbott campaign run by the ABC and fairfax really just shows how the news cycle was dominated by ideologues out for revenge. Meanwhile, important news, I end up reading about on websites generally for a US audience (this isn't the first time, it seems to be a recurring trend actually). Go figure, our media sucks, its just trying to brainwash, as it's definitely not trying to inform.
This isn't even for monitoring. It's so that they have data to sift through after the fact, in other words, if you come to the attention of the police. Maybe at a later date they'll start to automate thingsand go through the metadata as it comes in, but at this stage, it's just requiring ISP's to store it for an extended period of time.
Bottom line is, there's bipartisan support in parliament, so the public literally have no say on the issue.
Reading through the comments, many read like as if the commenter thinks that google doesn't know that their ads, scripts and trackers are not the best. I'm quite sure google knows that ads are making the internet, in general, a less than ideal experience. That's why a lot of people are using an adblocker. The thing is, has anyone considered that google may want to speed things up so that they can get away with loading up all these crap scripts, trackers and ads? After all, the less people notice that these things are taking place, the less likely they are blocking them, well that's my conjecture anyway.
I wouldn't say that they're great. Great would mean people queue up outside stores days in advance to get one. These products aren't that great. They may be good products, but I don't think very many people will go out and ditch their existing tech to replace it with MS's offerings. However, with that said, their surface line appears to finally be making some momentum.
I'm a windows phone user, and I can admit that it's dead. W10M is DOA, and it's quite sad, as having come to WP from android, it was great to use at the start, while missing a lot of features which were added in WP8.1, the best aspects of the OS got dumped. It's quite clear that the OS is on life support, they'll try with W10M, but it will go nowhere, it won't get the market share it needs for critical mass. What MS will do with it, I can't predict, but they bought a phone business, so I guess they'll keep on going with it.
If this becomes the norm, I think I'll find the last decent car which doesn't have any of this data mining crap masquerading as an infotainment system, buy a few of them, and rotate among them as cars, hopefully to last until I can't drive anymore. It's good to see that Porsche didn't get suckered in, but seriously, this is getting ridiculous with the amount of data they want to know.
As for the connected car, well, I think the concept of a car has worked reasonably well for the last 100 years, maybe people can make apps for cars or something which is google's excuse for the data, but seriously, this 'innovation' is the google equivalent of razor blades; add more blades. I can't see much of an advantage just throwing 'smarts' into everything.
What about when the hab airlock blows open, and then he seals it up with plastic and duct tape... While my calculations suggest that it's doable (if it's a 2m diameter opening, it would have a 30kg load over its area, if 2.5m diameter, then 47kg load all equally on its area) , with the violent weather depicted in the film, it would easily perforate, and I really doubt that airlock would have blown apart like it was shown. So, I can't say whether it's impossible or not, but definitely marginal.
My question is; is going to mars really a challenge?
Reason I'm asking this is because it's my opinion that when compared to the moon landing, where many challenges had to be overcome and a lot of learning had to take place, I'm of the opinion that the real challenge in a mars mission would be getting the money, whereas the difficulty of the science and engineering wouldn't be that immense.
I use opera, as it's my least hated browser. When I ditched FF due to Australis, the newest version of Opera was missing quite a few features. Still annoyed at the bookmarks handling, it's not good at all, can't export them to a file (for easy backups). Also, a few right click commands were missing, however I can't remember what they were now, I think it was opening a link in a new tab, but looks like it's there now.
Well, I probably shouldn't have spoken about incandescent bulbs (although the phoebus cartel does seem a little suspect), but I worked at a heating element manufacturer, and we made elements with no consideration to limiting life at all. As a result, we had elements in processes that were lasting well beyond 30 years. This couldn't be compared with competitors elements, who we were continually replacing. Heating elements essentially work in a very similar manner to an incandescent light bulb.
Then you consider planned obsolescence in many other devices. If you ever compare electric motors for domestic applications, to proper commercial applications (and I'm not talking about something with a label saying 'Heavy Duty'), you'll know what I mean, they're chalk and cheese between the two.
Economics only matter when they factor in planned obsolescence. The reality is, the cost to make the design that little bit better than the specifications call for, is usually not that big a factor because, invariably it's just a material cost. Yes there will be exceptions, but for a lot of electronic devices, like say an incandescent light bulb, well, they could make the filament better rated, but, if they did that, then light bulbs wouldn't have failed, and people wouldn't keep having to replace them.
There's a heap of manufacturers in China who are making no-name devices. I'm sure one of them would be more than happy to attach themselves to the Nokia name, as it would pull them out of the pit of insignificance, pretty much immediately.
As to your later part of your comment, Nokia really dropped the ball at the start of the smartphone era. They were in a great position, with some solid offerings for the time, but realistically had nothing to offer when the market moved to the 'slate' form factor. Nokia's first slate phone was about 4 years after they were introduced by competitors. Then couple that with some really dud offerings, plagued with hardware issues, by the time their lumia series was released, it was much too late. Their lumia phones, in terms of hardware, have been nothing short of excellent. Windows Phone, has been quite good, but for too long as well, it lacked basic functionality, meanwhile, the great features have gradually been dropped because they were too difficult to maintain, when integrated with the OS.
My gripe with the phone industry now is that flagship phones are going to absurd levels of specmanship. At some point, makers should realise that 1440p displays on a phone is just getting silly. I'd much prefer a ~720p display, for purposes of; it's good enough, and it should use less power, in terms of the display and processing requirements.
Not yet. They're going after the most complex problem now. What they could really look at is using large UAV's for air shipped goods in large quantities. The problem is again, reliability in making sure they don't crash and kill people on the ground.
The big advantage of using UAV's in flying is that the can exploit the efficiencies of balancing flight time, altitude and velocity while removing the human constraints. I'm not entirely sure what the optimum can be, but I'm hazarding a guess that flying higher and slower will require less energy to complete the trip. In ordinary piloted flying, well this creates the problem that the altitude means less oxygen, longer flying hours means additional crew for shift rotation which all preclude commercial flights from necessarily doing it. They might not even have to be planes, could very easily be solved with UAV blimps, although I think it's safe to assume that they still won't use hydrogen...
In all my years of shooting training (non military, rather olympic rifle shooting and similar disciplines), there are women who do come in and do rather well, however most often it happens that way if there's someone to set everything up and all they have to do is put a round in and pull the trigger. Obviously there will be exceptions to this. Military trained shooters, at the ordinary level, are usually hopeless at disciplined target shooting. It's fair enough, they're two completely different things, but top notch marksmanship at the ordinary soldier level is not the criteria which good soldiers are measured by, therefore, it's not the only thing they spend time training. However, to relate this to the original topic, my shooting training largely revolves around a couple of things; namely steadiness of hold, and setting up the correct natural point of aim, so that your position aligns with your target as precisely as possible.
A large support won't necessarily train that into someone, what it may do is aid in the mechanics of sighting, which can be elusive for the beginner if they're lumped with all variables at once. However, in my experience, once that has been trained, and it's usually fairly quick, the supports get taken away and the next variables are added to mix everything together. For all intents and purposes, they don't need a robot to do this, they could just place a rifle on a rest and achieve the same thing.
Lastly, there is no definitively correct shooting posture. Everyone is physiologically different, and at elite level shooting, you'd be very hard pressed to find two shooters doing exactly the same thing. At the olympic level, the rifles are very customisable, and everyone adjusts things to suit themselves. This creates a difficult situation in a military context, where firearms are, by design, mass produced and simple in nature, in order to keep costs down and expedite manufacture if the need arises. As a result, they don't have the ability to adjust in many fashions to suit an individuals anatomy. Sometimes, this needs to be compensated for with a shooting technique that can be less than ideal in other circumstances.
Yea i don't get this idea, it absolutely crazy. While I'm sure security experts are going to say why this is a bad idea from the start, at least make it an easy opt out, not some crazy way to not do it.
Well, the things that I tend to do most often is make my own tools for fairly specific tasks. One of my greatest eureka moments was when I realised that I can 3D print my own tool to open a watch case. It took a few iterations (plastic after all is weak), but I finally hit on something that's reliable enough, and it won't scratch the watch case. This was all because I took it in some years ago for a battery change, and the person kind of made a mess of trying to open it, they bent a strap pin, put tears in the leather strap, and scratched the case back. Fortunately it was my cheap daily watch, but still, I got paranoid after that, and had no intention of going to that person again. Now, I save a few dollars by buying my own batteries, and they're good brand ones too, and use a plastic tool to open the watch. No chance of marking it.
The point isn't so much that 3D printing is awesome, but it's really great when you realise that with this tool (3D printer that is) I can do things which I previously would never do. I'd never consider making a tool before unless it could be made with sheet metal and a hammer and file, and in some ways, the tool I made is better than one I could buy.
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I think this is the main thing, the inertia on quality headphones using 3.5mm plugs just makes this a silly decision. Additionally, there's just a point where getting a phone thinner is just being silly. Give me better battery life over a thinner device. Problem is the industry appears to be dead set against progressing beyond a 1 day battery.
As a NSW resident, the 3D printing aspect is just one part. There has been some reporting of backyard manufacture of firearms, usually machine pistols. This legislation, doesn't just prohibit 3D printing blueprints, but also specifically prohibits blueprints for electronic milling machines as well (CNC mills).
This isn't going to change anything much at all. They didn't ban manufacture of firearms through these methods, the people who can legally manufacture firearms, are exempt from these restrictions. What is dangerous about it is that it's basically banning knowledge, to some extent. Will they ban drug recipes? What about chemistry books if they have instructions that can aid drug manufacture? The possibilties are endless, and that's where the US first amendment is such a powerful right, which few other nations have granted to their respective serfs.
Actually the legislation covers that very scenario, basically defining 'being in possession' across jurisdictions. Bottom line is, there was some media talk about 3D printed firearms, the police tried some out and put out videos of them blowing up, but after the sydney siege late last year, they couldn't let a crisis go to waste, so put out this legislation. It's just politicians trying to look like as if they're doing something, but in reality, are powerless to do anything.
To answer your question though, yes, anything can be banned here, we have almost no protected rights, so anything can be given, or taken, at the whim of parliament.
Trust me they won't get any less distraction now without Abbott, and it's because the media is running the narrative of public discourse, and the media is filled to the brim with ideologues. They're too busy spreading their doctrine on their holy trinity of refugees, gay marriage and climate change.
I just look at their coverage, when they do, of tech things, and on topics that I'm knowledgeable about, the Australian media is invariably hopelessly wrong.
I know what I said is a simplification, but it's true in the context of the real world, and not the idealised parliamentary procedure. Take voting for the greens, they're a fringe party that struggles beyond 10%, they're popularity is also amongst the wealthiest inner city class, whilst deeply unpopular among the poorest classes in Australia. Now, we don't operate strictly in a two party system, but in practice we do. Technically speaking, when our parliaments were first formed, there wasn't a concept of a political party. It was meant to be that each member operated on their own. This was unworkable, as no one could agree to anything, starting parties alleviated this and really did allow political progress. Technically speaking, the constitution still doesn't recognise or allow for political parties. It probably explains why we're having such political turmoil with so many state and federal leaders shuffled along, because there's too many competing interests going on, and no actual vision from our leaders, rather focus group driven policy.
I am extremely dissatisfied with the erosion of personal liberties in Australia. I definitely won't be voting for Labor, Coalition, nor the greens, because they all have the same authoritarian streak in them. The problem is, most people do vote within the two party system, so that's why with preferential voting system, at some point you do have to choose where your vote goes, and pick the lesser of multiple evils. The only choice I have is to either vote informal, or decide where my election funds go with my vote (your upper and lower house votes are worth >$5 in election funds so always pick your most preferred candidate first).
You're so obviously biased. Now that Abbott is gone, do you realise that the mastermind behind this policy is in charge! After all Turnbull was communications minister up until a month ago, this is his policy!
I've mentioned in a previous post though, the issue got bipartisan support, so the public have no say on this. Then the anti-Abbott campaign run by the ABC and fairfax really just shows how the news cycle was dominated by ideologues out for revenge. Meanwhile, important news, I end up reading about on websites generally for a US audience (this isn't the first time, it seems to be a recurring trend actually). Go figure, our media sucks, its just trying to brainwash, as it's definitely not trying to inform.
This isn't even for monitoring. It's so that they have data to sift through after the fact, in other words, if you come to the attention of the police. Maybe at a later date they'll start to automate thingsand go through the metadata as it comes in, but at this stage, it's just requiring ISP's to store it for an extended period of time.
Bottom line is, there's bipartisan support in parliament, so the public literally have no say on the issue.
Reading through the comments, many read like as if the commenter thinks that google doesn't know that their ads, scripts and trackers are not the best. I'm quite sure google knows that ads are making the internet, in general, a less than ideal experience. That's why a lot of people are using an adblocker. The thing is, has anyone considered that google may want to speed things up so that they can get away with loading up all these crap scripts, trackers and ads? After all, the less people notice that these things are taking place, the less likely they are blocking them, well that's my conjecture anyway.
If I didn't have my heart set on the retro thinkpad project, I'd most probably go for a surface, probably the surface book.
I wouldn't say that they're great. Great would mean people queue up outside stores days in advance to get one. These products aren't that great. They may be good products, but I don't think very many people will go out and ditch their existing tech to replace it with MS's offerings. However, with that said, their surface line appears to finally be making some momentum.
I'm a windows phone user, and I can admit that it's dead. W10M is DOA, and it's quite sad, as having come to WP from android, it was great to use at the start, while missing a lot of features which were added in WP8.1, the best aspects of the OS got dumped. It's quite clear that the OS is on life support, they'll try with W10M, but it will go nowhere, it won't get the market share it needs for critical mass. What MS will do with it, I can't predict, but they bought a phone business, so I guess they'll keep on going with it.
If this becomes the norm, I think I'll find the last decent car which doesn't have any of this data mining crap masquerading as an infotainment system, buy a few of them, and rotate among them as cars, hopefully to last until I can't drive anymore. It's good to see that Porsche didn't get suckered in, but seriously, this is getting ridiculous with the amount of data they want to know.
As for the connected car, well, I think the concept of a car has worked reasonably well for the last 100 years, maybe people can make apps for cars or something which is google's excuse for the data, but seriously, this 'innovation' is the google equivalent of razor blades; add more blades. I can't see much of an advantage just throwing 'smarts' into everything.
What about when the hab airlock blows open, and then he seals it up with plastic and duct tape... While my calculations suggest that it's doable (if it's a 2m diameter opening, it would have a 30kg load over its area, if 2.5m diameter, then 47kg load all equally on its area) , with the violent weather depicted in the film, it would easily perforate, and I really doubt that airlock would have blown apart like it was shown. So, I can't say whether it's impossible or not, but definitely marginal.
My question is; is going to mars really a challenge?
Reason I'm asking this is because it's my opinion that when compared to the moon landing, where many challenges had to be overcome and a lot of learning had to take place, I'm of the opinion that the real challenge in a mars mission would be getting the money, whereas the difficulty of the science and engineering wouldn't be that immense.
I don't think they're in Australia...
I use opera, as it's my least hated browser. When I ditched FF due to Australis, the newest version of Opera was missing quite a few features. Still annoyed at the bookmarks handling, it's not good at all, can't export them to a file (for easy backups). Also, a few right click commands were missing, however I can't remember what they were now, I think it was opening a link in a new tab, but looks like it's there now.
I would change Opera to 'least worst'.
Well, I probably shouldn't have spoken about incandescent bulbs (although the phoebus cartel does seem a little suspect), but I worked at a heating element manufacturer, and we made elements with no consideration to limiting life at all. As a result, we had elements in processes that were lasting well beyond 30 years. This couldn't be compared with competitors elements, who we were continually replacing. Heating elements essentially work in a very similar manner to an incandescent light bulb.
Then you consider planned obsolescence in many other devices. If you ever compare electric motors for domestic applications, to proper commercial applications (and I'm not talking about something with a label saying 'Heavy Duty'), you'll know what I mean, they're chalk and cheese between the two.
Economics only matter when they factor in planned obsolescence. The reality is, the cost to make the design that little bit better than the specifications call for, is usually not that big a factor because, invariably it's just a material cost. Yes there will be exceptions, but for a lot of electronic devices, like say an incandescent light bulb, well, they could make the filament better rated, but, if they did that, then light bulbs wouldn't have failed, and people wouldn't keep having to replace them.
There's a heap of manufacturers in China who are making no-name devices. I'm sure one of them would be more than happy to attach themselves to the Nokia name, as it would pull them out of the pit of insignificance, pretty much immediately.
As to your later part of your comment, Nokia really dropped the ball at the start of the smartphone era. They were in a great position, with some solid offerings for the time, but realistically had nothing to offer when the market moved to the 'slate' form factor. Nokia's first slate phone was about 4 years after they were introduced by competitors. Then couple that with some really dud offerings, plagued with hardware issues, by the time their lumia series was released, it was much too late. Their lumia phones, in terms of hardware, have been nothing short of excellent. Windows Phone, has been quite good, but for too long as well, it lacked basic functionality, meanwhile, the great features have gradually been dropped because they were too difficult to maintain, when integrated with the OS.
My gripe with the phone industry now is that flagship phones are going to absurd levels of specmanship. At some point, makers should realise that 1440p displays on a phone is just getting silly. I'd much prefer a ~720p display, for purposes of; it's good enough, and it should use less power, in terms of the display and processing requirements.
Not yet. They're going after the most complex problem now. What they could really look at is using large UAV's for air shipped goods in large quantities. The problem is again, reliability in making sure they don't crash and kill people on the ground.
The big advantage of using UAV's in flying is that the can exploit the efficiencies of balancing flight time, altitude and velocity while removing the human constraints. I'm not entirely sure what the optimum can be, but I'm hazarding a guess that flying higher and slower will require less energy to complete the trip. In ordinary piloted flying, well this creates the problem that the altitude means less oxygen, longer flying hours means additional crew for shift rotation which all preclude commercial flights from necessarily doing it. They might not even have to be planes, could very easily be solved with UAV blimps, although I think it's safe to assume that they still won't use hydrogen...
In all my years of shooting training (non military, rather olympic rifle shooting and similar disciplines), there are women who do come in and do rather well, however most often it happens that way if there's someone to set everything up and all they have to do is put a round in and pull the trigger. Obviously there will be exceptions to this. Military trained shooters, at the ordinary level, are usually hopeless at disciplined target shooting. It's fair enough, they're two completely different things, but top notch marksmanship at the ordinary soldier level is not the criteria which good soldiers are measured by, therefore, it's not the only thing they spend time training. However, to relate this to the original topic, my shooting training largely revolves around a couple of things; namely steadiness of hold, and setting up the correct natural point of aim, so that your position aligns with your target as precisely as possible.
A large support won't necessarily train that into someone, what it may do is aid in the mechanics of sighting, which can be elusive for the beginner if they're lumped with all variables at once. However, in my experience, once that has been trained, and it's usually fairly quick, the supports get taken away and the next variables are added to mix everything together. For all intents and purposes, they don't need a robot to do this, they could just place a rifle on a rest and achieve the same thing.
Lastly, there is no definitively correct shooting posture. Everyone is physiologically different, and at elite level shooting, you'd be very hard pressed to find two shooters doing exactly the same thing. At the olympic level, the rifles are very customisable, and everyone adjusts things to suit themselves. This creates a difficult situation in a military context, where firearms are, by design, mass produced and simple in nature, in order to keep costs down and expedite manufacture if the need arises. As a result, they don't have the ability to adjust in many fashions to suit an individuals anatomy. Sometimes, this needs to be compensated for with a shooting technique that can be less than ideal in other circumstances.
Gjoni isn't a journalist!
Yea i don't get this idea, it absolutely crazy. While I'm sure security experts are going to say why this is a bad idea from the start, at least make it an easy opt out, not some crazy way to not do it.
Well, the things that I tend to do most often is make my own tools for fairly specific tasks. One of my greatest eureka moments was when I realised that I can 3D print my own tool to open a watch case. It took a few iterations (plastic after all is weak), but I finally hit on something that's reliable enough, and it won't scratch the watch case. This was all because I took it in some years ago for a battery change, and the person kind of made a mess of trying to open it, they bent a strap pin, put tears in the leather strap, and scratched the case back. Fortunately it was my cheap daily watch, but still, I got paranoid after that, and had no intention of going to that person again. Now, I save a few dollars by buying my own batteries, and they're good brand ones too, and use a plastic tool to open the watch. No chance of marking it.
The point isn't so much that 3D printing is awesome, but it's really great when you realise that with this tool (3D printer that is) I can do things which I previously would never do. I'd never consider making a tool before unless it could be made with sheet metal and a hammer and file, and in some ways, the tool I made is better than one I could buy.