If the focus is built to handle a 60 MPH head-on collision, and it hits an Explorer, it is like having a 4500 / 2600 * 60 = 104 MPH collision.
There's something wrong with your math. By this logic if a 2600 pound Focus gets hit by a fully loaded 80,000 pound semi at 5MPH, it's like a 153 MPH collision. Which is clearly wrong.
Let's see if I can work this out: You have two vehicles, combined weight 7100 pounds (2600+4500), colliding at a combined 60MPH. So it should be that the 2600 pound vehicle feels a 120 * (7100-2600)/7100 = 76MPH collision while the 4500 pound vehicle feels a 120 * (7100-4500)/7100 = 44MPH collision. Sucks for the smaller car, but not necessarily fatal. (Ignoring that whole bumper height thing.)
More to the point, regulating curb weight doesn't get you very far. Let's say we demand that Ford start making the Explorer out of light weight space age unobtainium, so that now it weighs exactly the same amount as the Focus. Then Joe Sixpack takes his two 400 pound mothers-in-law to the hardware store to buy a dozen 100 pound bags of road salt. You're back to the same situation: If they hit a smaller car, they've got a lot more momentum. So unless you're going to ban heavy cargo and mothers-in-law from the roads, you haven't solved the problem.
The problem with the data is that there are too many external factors. When they initially lowered the speed limit, they combined it with an enforcement campaign, which meant that many people were following it initially, plus people drive more conservatively in general when there are more cops around. Moreover, 1974 was right around the time when car manufacturers started taking safety more seriously. The 1970s saw the introduction of popular American car models with anti-lock brakes and air bags. People started wearing seat belts more often. And 1973-1974 was the oil crisis when oil prices tripled in a year (until they doubled again in 1979). People started driving less at almost exactly the same time as they imposed the new speed limit.
Conversely, by 1995 US gas prices were at ~$1/gallon, people were driving more every year, and there were few major new safety features being installed on new vehicles that weren't present on the models they replaced. On top of that, the 1990s was the decade of the SUV, so that the safety level of vehicles people were buying actually started going down.
Then you throw in the fact that the article is cherry picking numbers. You get this quote:
Between 1995 and 2007, traffic deaths generally hovered between 41,000 and 43,000 each year. In 1994, the year before Congress repealed the national speed limit, slightly less than 41,000 people died in accidents.
What the article ignores is that there were fewer fatalities in 1995 and the years following than there were in any year between 1965 and 1990, and that several larger jumps up or down in the number of fatalities occurred in years where there was no change in the speed limit. These are the year to year changes in the number of fatalities for the following years:
The jump they're discussing is the one between 1994-1995. It doesn't even stand out. And it follows a huge drop between 1988 and 1992, the reversal of which had already started by 1993. The increase between 1992 and 1994 was larger than the increase between 1994 and 1996.
Indeed - just as people are comfortable going fast at the expense of lives, they are comfortable making money at the expense of lives.
You're missing the point. It isn't that we can't spend money to save lives, it's that we have to make it cost effective. The cost of effective traffic enforcement is huge -- if it's effective then it isn't self-funding because by definition if it's effective there are very few violators. But having tens of thousands of cops on the road that each cost $100K/year + benefits + equipment + fuel + overtime etc. adds up to billions of dollars every year. You can get more bang from that number of bucks by applying the resources to other places.
But basic physics is not in your corner with a light car.
People say this, but the difference isn't as much as most people make out. Most cars weigh about the same amount, e.g. Ford Focus (2600 lbs.), Fusion (3300), Escape (3300), Mustang (3500), Taurus (4000), Crown Victoria (4100), Explorer (4500). They're all about the same plus or minus a mother-in-law or two in the back seat. I mean sure, you wouldn't want to get hit by an Explorer while you're in a Focus. But you wouldn't want to get hit by an Explorer, full stop. Most large vehicles, especially SUVs, are fully capable of dishing out more than they can take.
You'll get labeled a kook if you suggest we lower our speed limits for safety reasons, despite it saving thousands of lives.
No, you get labeled a kook for perfectly logical reasons: Lowering the speed limit doesn't significantly change the speed most people drive. In fact, it makes things more dangerous, because you get most people driving significantly over the new speed limit while a couple of sticklers follow the limit and the speed differential creates a serious hazard.
Easy fix, you say? Just enforce the speed limit so that people will follow it? Now you've got a revenue problem. If you enforce the speed limit well enough that people stop speeding, you increase your enforcement costs and reduce your ticket revenue, because as the chance of getting caught increases, more people stop speeding and the amount of ticket revenue per enforcement dollar trends toward zero. So you turn what was once a profit center for the government into a huge money pit.
It would probably be less expensive, and save about as many lives, if they would just make "trucks" (SUVs) meet the same safety standards as passenger vehicles.
So your solution is "Kill them"? There really is no such thing as secure anymore. Devices and software can be(and are) hacked within days of their release or implementation. Sufficiently secure? If someone wants in, you're fighting an uphill battle keeping them out.
You don't have to be faster than the bear, you only have to be faster than the whoever you're standing next to.
And it's disingenuous to leave the tires brakes and all other maintenance for the next owner. Unless you are buying a brand new car every couple of years (something that would cost a huge amount) you are going to need new brakes and tires at some point.
Certainly. But you don't count both depreciation and repairs, because you only pay one to the extent that you don't pay the other. If you sell the car straight away then the fact that the brake pads are at 62.5% instead of 63% is the next owner's problem, and he is willing to pay you slightly less for the car as a result of the added miles (depreciation). If instead you keep the car for many years, so that you still own it when it ultimately needs brake pads, then you will have to pay for brake pads slightly sooner than you would otherwise, but this is offset by the fact that the amount of depreciation caused by the added miles becomes negligible as the value of the vehicle (and thus the amount of depreciation caused by a higher odometer reading) approaches zero. That is to say, if you sell a vehicle for ~$18,000 with 36,000 miles on it, adding 225 miles might reduce the market value by ~$12. If you keep it for several more years so that when you sell it, it has 120,000 miles on it and is only worth ~$2000, the market value might then only go down by ~$1 for every extra 225 miles. And the $11 difference approximately paid for 225 miles worth of brake pads, tires, repairs, etc. -- the approximation being good to the extent that the blue book value is a fair representation of the market value and the market value is a fair representation of the actual cost of the impairment of the condition of the vehicle as a result of the added miles.
The investopedia numbers are trying to account for sunk costs like the purchase price of the car, the cost of buying insurance, tax, title and license, etc. If the question is how much it costs to put an extra 225 miles on the vehicle once you already own it, those numbers are overinflated, because you pay the sunk costs whether you drive the extra miles or not.
As I already explained, the linear costs are largely reflected in the depreciation already accounted for -- the blue book value goes down because the next owner knows he will have to replace the brake pads and tires sooner, etc. Moreover, this is highway driving. Traffic permitting, you can get on the highway in Boston, set the cruise control and not use the brakes until you get to the off ramp in New York.
I'll give you the oil change, because it has to be done frequently enough that it won't be reflected in the blue book value, but a $30 oil change every 3000 miles is 1c/mile. Are we really arguing over $2.25?
And the $49 ticket one month in advance is the Northeast Regional. The premise of the discussion is that the Accela Express is just as fast as driving, and it costs $99.
If enough people get pissed off with poor service then other companies will jump at the chance to fill the void.
Right, so that the increased competition will drive down prices and increase value for consumers.
Except that the prospective competitor knows that it entering the market would increase competition and reduce margins. And making a huge up front capital outlay in order to enter a market that would consequently have low margin is not conducive to making a good ROI, so the prospective competitor declines to enter the market.
Self defense would imply that the retaliation would stop the attack. It fairly obviously wouldn't, because it doesn't incapacitate the attackers. No matter what you do to the attacker's computer, at worst he just has to format it and start over, and if the attacker isn't an idiot he has backups. Which means you bought maybe a couple hours before you're back to square one. Maybe a couple days or a week if you disable a botnet. But now now the attacker (who may very well be better at this than you and have less to lose) is irate and more likely to wantonly destroy your data.
The only answer to "cyber attacks" is to keep your systems secure and, failing that, to keep good backups. All this noise about retaliation and law enforcement and whatever else is just a distraction -- if your systems are sufficiently secure then you have nothing to worry about, and if they're blatantly insecure then you reap what you sow.
For a family of 5 in a jalopy of course it's cheaper to drive. But that is a silly test. How many cars do you see on the road full of five people?
Five people is just making the point. The cost of the train ticket for two adults is still ~$200, which is still 5-10 times as much.
If you have one or two people and you factor in depreciation of you nice new mercedes due to added millage, maintenance (brakes, tires, oil changes, car washes, washer fluid, wear and tear on every other bit of the car) possibility of an accident and the expenses related to that, chance of a break down and being stranded on the side of the road with zombies chasing you etc etc it makes for a better case for the train...
You're accusing me of cherry picking and then trying to count depreciation on a Mercedes?
The reduction in the trade in blue book value on a 2008 Ford Explorer (and most other proletariat-achievable vehicles) between 36000 and 36225 miles was $0. Adding 550 miles reduced the value by $25, so figure half of that for our 225 mile trip. That brings the SUV trip total to ~$50 from ~$38. And claiming both depreciation and wear and tear is double counting, since the wear and tear is the reason for the depreciation -- either you trade it in and the added wear and tear is the next owner's problem or you keep it until the wheels fall off and depreciation is irrelevant.
Likewise, the cost of an accident or breakdown are both negligible per highway mile given their probability and the fact that insurance pays for most damage, and partially offset by the fact that trains can get into accidents or break down too (which, though less probable, affect a far larger number of people).
The fact is that rail only works in well-designed cities without urban sprawl. Mass transit works locally in NYC because it was planned that way from the beginning -- there was metro rail in the 19th century and a subway under construction by the turn of the 20th. Cities like Los Angeles and Houston will always have crap mass transit. And rail between cities is pretty useless if in most of the cities you can't get to or from the train station.
The Acela Express from Boston to NYC takes about the same time as driving, despite the fact that it makes a detour to Providence.
The trip by car is about 225 miles. Figure gas costs $4/gallon. If you've got one of those fuel sucking SUVs that only gets 25 MPG highway, you're paying $36. If you've got a hybrid it's half that much.
So your family of five is taking a trip to NYC from Boston. SUV: ~$40, Hybrid: ~$20, AmTrak: ~$400. The train would be great if it didn't cost 10 to 20 times as much money.
Whatever you think of global warming, pollution is nasty, and giving us such delightful things as asthma.
Most "pollution" today (excepting CO2) is emphatically not from modern cars. The air in most major cities is dirtier than the exhaust from a modern car with modern emissions controls.
Today's pollution comes from coal plants built a half century ago, virtually unregulated marine diesel engines in harbors, petrochemical industry plants, etc. It's not cars. And if we would shut down or retrofit the old plants and prohibit highly sulfur-contaminated fuels, most of it would go away.
Of course, that would slightly raise energy costs, so why bother?
Capitalism, it's what's for dinner. Want something else? Go be born to someone else, or embrace a different economic system. Mmm, capitalism. Goes down easy, comes up hard.
It wouldn't be a problem if it was just capitalism. The problem is that China is a company and a country. There is nobody there to enforce antitrust laws. You like your cheap stuff today, but what happens if they dump cheap goods on the market below cost until everyone else goes bust, and then raise the price once no one is left who knows how to make it?
The problem that I see for China is that without having to do the R&D, they get the current tech, understand it, maybe make some improvements to that tech. However, I'm not sure if China has the capability to keep up with other global companies, companies that are investing for future technologies. If China doesn't steal those plans, they'll start to fall behind again, which creates a nice purchasing loop for those global companies.
You're assuming US companies will still have any revenue with which to fund R&D. We're not talking about microprocessors here -- the technology doesn't change that fast. The 747 is from 1969. That's the year we first landed on the moon. If China starts selling five year old technology for half price, five years worth of aircraft "innovation" isn't going to make up for the price difference.
I really don't think they'll turn off Flash for a long time; there are still tons of people using ancient browsers that have no HTML5 video support. I'm looking at you, IE version 9. There are still XP users who, if they don't use something other than IE, will not get IE9.
Right, so those users will go to YouTube and see a message that says "you need Chrome Frame with the WebM plugin to view this page, click here to install (free!)" just like they see on any number of pages today if they don't have Flash installed.
It's probably true to say that the different UI paradigms available on a portable device as compared to a desktop or console, are so different that you'd only be carrying over the art and media if you were hoping to write something common to both.
I don't know, I mean clearly you want to make different design choices based on whether you have a keyboard and mouse vs. a touchscreen or a 26" widescreen vs. a 4" phone, but Linux is Linux. More to the point, if you're already making versions of your software that will run on both OS X and Android, the extra work necessary to get it working on desktop Linux is likely to be minimal. Or conversely, if you have it working on desktop Linux and iOS, you can easily port it to Android.
My point was that those 2% are not on the whole gamers, by definition, because if they were they wouldn't be running Linux.
More likely they use Linux 95% of the time but have a Windows partition or VM somewhere for the software that won't run native on Linux or in WINE. But having to fire up Windows for just one program is very annoying. Which means that if it comes down to a choice between one of two games, and one includes a native Linux version, that one gets the sale.
In addition, you're assuming that because someone uses Linux they won't buy games. Maybe they don't buy games because most games don't run on Linux, and they can't be bothered to maintain a Windows instance? Or because they can't stand Microsoft products? Again, the fact that there aren't a lot of games for Linux means that anyone who produces one can capture a larger portion of that market.
What % of desktops are Linux? 2%? It's not worth the development effort for a mainstream consumer product, especially given that a fair number of that 2% aren't gamers anyway (if they were, they'd be on Windows!).
You say 2% like it's a small percentage, but in absolute terms it's a large number of people. Millions. And if you have something that runs on OS X, getting it to run on Linux is not a herculean endeavor. It's not like they have to rewrite everything from scratch. In non-outlier cases it would have a positive ROI.
Add to that the fact that most games aren't released for Linux, which means that if yours is, you're likely to get proportionally more sales than on other platforms because there is less competition. Plus the goodwill you build with customers by supporting their preferred platforms. Plus it puts your company in a good position if e.g. some Android derivative or any other Linux-based OS makes it onto a large number of gaming-capable devices all of a sudden, because you already have your product tested and ready while your competitors are scrambling to add Linux support.
If you had any patents that you believe WebM is infringing on, suing _now_ build be totally stupid. You would wait until WebM is a lot, lot bigger.
It depends what your intention is. If you're a patent troll with one patent who just wants the biggest payout, sure. But if you're someone who wants H.264 to win out over WebM, whether because you have a large number of patents you're collecting royalties on for H.264 or because you're invested in hardware that only decodes H.264 or for whatever other reason, you want to stamp out WebM before it takes root. You have to do it now.
And those are the people anybody cares about. The solitary patent trolls are a wash because they can afflict either format.
....for whatever reason. People signed on to Facebook with their real names.
It's the first popular social network where you can actually find people from real life.
I've heard this before, but why does that make them different? Why can't the Next Big Thing also use real names, if that is such a required feature?
And it seems like "real names" is one of the things that makes Facebook so annoying. Nobody wants "mom" or hiring managers reading the messages intended for drinking buddies. People hate being forced to choose between turning down friend requests from certain real friends and having to sanitize everything they write because everyone you know will be reading it.
Or to put it a different way, what's so hard about telling your friends, in person, through email, or using Facebook, that your user ID on some new service is joe@example.com?
I don't believe that Facebook is worth the valuation financial media (and institutions) are touting today (>$50B). And I'm not sure Goldman intends to keep its investment in Facebook for a long time. I suppose they are trying to find as many suckers as they can, push Facebook through IPO with share price inflated several times, then sell their investment with profit to unsuspecting public, pension funds etc. (a.k.a. suckers), collect fees/profits on it and leave everyone with the bag.
This. "Social networking" websites are not long-term investments. There was once a time when everybody thought that no one would ever catch up to the market share of AOL instant messenger. It wasn't two years ago that all the kids were using Myspace. How is Facebook different?
I think we are increasingly moving toward a model where people will subscribe to sources of information/entertainment if they don't want to see the ads, or they will get a free version that includes ads (and possibly presents other limitations in format or content).
Wouldn't surprise me to see Wikipedia go this way.
Honestly, I would expect them to stay just the way they are, if they want to badly enough. Think about it: They're already the fifth most popular website. They are unlikely to become substantially more popular than that, which means that their operation costs are already close to their peak level. Now consider this: 1) The cost of bandwidth and servers, which has got to be some large fraction of their expenses, go down over time. 2) They made their financing goal for this year, a year in which by (1) their costs are likely to be higher than in future years.
Also, $16M in the scheme of things is not a lot of money. If that's their yearly budget then all it would take is one billionaire to provide them a $350M or so endowment in a will or something and they would be set forever just on the interest. (That is, once interest rates get back above 0% again.)
Realistically, the biggest threat to Wikipedia is ISPs violating network neutrality. If Wikipedia had to pay whatever tithe each ISP decided they were entitled to in order to reach their subjects, that could explode their costs pretty quickly and require them to seek other sources of funding.
You wouldn't consider it acceptable if your company just fired you and a lot of other people , just because a machine can do your job faster and cheaper.
Why not? That's why they make unemployment insurance: You get some time to go out and find a job doing something else. And if you aren't qualified for anything else, that's why they make state-subsidized universities. There are always other jobs -- if we ever get to a point where there aren't, it will be because literally everything is made by machines, and therefore everything is effectively non-scarce and can be had for no money, so who needs a job?
It would be acceptable if they slowly replaced people with machines ( for example when they retire )
It will never work that way. First of all, doing it that way retards progress for a generation and makes everybody pay more than necessary for goods in the meantime. But more relevantly, if existing incumbents refuse to adopt the new technologies until their workers retire (say they have union contracts requiring it), someone else will just start a new mill that uses the labor saving devices and the company that does what you want will soon go out of business.
Although they had the right intentions: machinery lowered the pay and job security of the workers for the benefit of the mill owners.
How is that possibly "the right intentions"? Labor saving technologies are the reason we aren't all subsistence farmers. They are, almost to the exclusion of anything else, the way people on "the bottom" can increase their standard of living.
He's probably just playing hardball with Microsoft for a discount. You may notice that every time some country announces that it's moving to Linux, they inevitably announce, 3 months later, that they changed their mind and are sticking with Microsoft.
Are you sure it isn't the other way around? A large entity transitioning to Linux is very bad news for Microsoft. Right now Windows has several advantages over Linux. We all know what they are: Windows runs legacy Win32 software better than Linux with WINE, MS Office is the de facto standard document format, etc. Insert whatever reasons you have for why Windows is on more PCs than Linux.
The problem for Microsoft is that if a large entity with a lot of resources makes a serious push for Linux everywhere, those resources get behind fixing those issues. And, especially with governments, they have no good reason not to push their changes upstream to avoid having to maintain a fork that slowly diverges from the public tree.
So if a large entity announces that it's transitioning to Linux, Microsoft has a real incentive to do anything they can to stop it. Free licenses, free services, free bags of cash money, anything. Because it's better for their bottom line to give stuff away to a government here or there than to sit by as that government makes enterprise-wide Linux "work" while demonstrating as much to the world.
If what you're suggesting is actually what's going on then that is very bad for MS, because their strategy only works when hardly anybody threatens to go Linux. If governments and large corporations left and right are using it as a bargaining chip to vitiate Microsoft's licensing revenues then they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they keep offering sweetheart deals to everybody then they destroy their revenue base, but if they don't then some number of entities will start actually making the transition and the more who do, the more the others realize that it's doable.
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If the focus is built to handle a 60 MPH head-on collision, and it hits an Explorer, it is like having a 4500 / 2600 * 60 = 104 MPH collision.
There's something wrong with your math. By this logic if a 2600 pound Focus gets hit by a fully loaded 80,000 pound semi at 5MPH, it's like a 153 MPH collision. Which is clearly wrong.
Let's see if I can work this out: You have two vehicles, combined weight 7100 pounds (2600+4500), colliding at a combined 60MPH. So it should be that the 2600 pound vehicle feels a 120 * (7100-2600)/7100 = 76MPH collision while the 4500 pound vehicle feels a 120 * (7100-4500)/7100 = 44MPH collision. Sucks for the smaller car, but not necessarily fatal. (Ignoring that whole bumper height thing.)
More to the point, regulating curb weight doesn't get you very far. Let's say we demand that Ford start making the Explorer out of light weight space age unobtainium, so that now it weighs exactly the same amount as the Focus. Then Joe Sixpack takes his two 400 pound mothers-in-law to the hardware store to buy a dozen 100 pound bags of road salt. You're back to the same situation: If they hit a smaller car, they've got a lot more momentum. So unless you're going to ban heavy cargo and mothers-in-law from the roads, you haven't solved the problem.
Even on highways, your thesis is debatable.
The problem with the data is that there are too many external factors. When they initially lowered the speed limit, they combined it with an enforcement campaign, which meant that many people were following it initially, plus people drive more conservatively in general when there are more cops around. Moreover, 1974 was right around the time when car manufacturers started taking safety more seriously. The 1970s saw the introduction of popular American car models with anti-lock brakes and air bags. People started wearing seat belts more often. And 1973-1974 was the oil crisis when oil prices tripled in a year (until they doubled again in 1979). People started driving less at almost exactly the same time as they imposed the new speed limit.
Conversely, by 1995 US gas prices were at ~$1/gallon, people were driving more every year, and there were few major new safety features being installed on new vehicles that weren't present on the models they replaced. On top of that, the 1990s was the decade of the SUV, so that the safety level of vehicles people were buying actually started going down.
Then you throw in the fact that the article is cherry picking numbers. You get this quote:
Between 1995 and 2007, traffic deaths generally hovered between 41,000 and 43,000 each year. In 1994, the year before Congress repealed the national speed limit, slightly less than 41,000 people died in accidents.
What the article ignores is that there were fewer fatalities in 1995 and the years following than there were in any year between 1965 and 1990, and that several larger jumps up or down in the number of fatalities occurred in years where there was no change in the speed limit. These are the year to year changes in the number of fatalities for the following years:
1980-1981: -1790
1981-1982: -5356
1982-1983: -1356
1983-1984: +1668
1984-1985: -462
1985-1986: +2261
1986-1987: +329
1987-1988: +708
1988-1989: -1538
1989-1990: -1026
1990-1991: -3367
1991-1992: -1927
1992-1993: +880
1993-1994: +561
1994-1995: +1122
1995-1996: +109
1996-1997: +60
The jump they're discussing is the one between 1994-1995. It doesn't even stand out. And it follows a huge drop between 1988 and 1992, the reversal of which had already started by 1993. The increase between 1992 and 1994 was larger than the increase between 1994 and 1996.
Indeed - just as people are comfortable going fast at the expense of lives, they are comfortable making money at the expense of lives.
You're missing the point. It isn't that we can't spend money to save lives, it's that we have to make it cost effective. The cost of effective traffic enforcement is huge -- if it's effective then it isn't self-funding because by definition if it's effective there are very few violators. But having tens of thousands of cops on the road that each cost $100K/year + benefits + equipment + fuel + overtime etc. adds up to billions of dollars every year. You can get more bang from that number of bucks by applying the resources to other places.
But basic physics is not in your corner with a light car.
People say this, but the difference isn't as much as most people make out. Most cars weigh about the same amount, e.g. Ford Focus (2600 lbs.), Fusion (3300), Escape (3300), Mustang (3500), Taurus (4000), Crown Victoria (4100), Explorer (4500). They're all about the same plus or minus a mother-in-law or two in the back seat. I mean sure, you wouldn't want to get hit by an Explorer while you're in a Focus. But you wouldn't want to get hit by an Explorer, full stop. Most large vehicles, especially SUVs, are fully capable of dishing out more than they can take.
You'll get labeled a kook if you suggest we lower our speed limits for safety reasons, despite it saving thousands of lives.
No, you get labeled a kook for perfectly logical reasons: Lowering the speed limit doesn't significantly change the speed most people drive. In fact, it makes things more dangerous, because you get most people driving significantly over the new speed limit while a couple of sticklers follow the limit and the speed differential creates a serious hazard.
Easy fix, you say? Just enforce the speed limit so that people will follow it? Now you've got a revenue problem. If you enforce the speed limit well enough that people stop speeding, you increase your enforcement costs and reduce your ticket revenue, because as the chance of getting caught increases, more people stop speeding and the amount of ticket revenue per enforcement dollar trends toward zero. So you turn what was once a profit center for the government into a huge money pit.
It would probably be less expensive, and save about as many lives, if they would just make "trucks" (SUVs) meet the same safety standards as passenger vehicles.
So your solution is "Kill them"? There really is no such thing as secure anymore. Devices and software can be(and are) hacked within days of their release or implementation. Sufficiently secure? If someone wants in, you're fighting an uphill battle keeping them out.
You don't have to be faster than the bear, you only have to be faster than the whoever you're standing next to.
And it's disingenuous to leave the tires brakes and all other maintenance for the next owner. Unless you are buying a brand new car every couple of years (something that would cost a huge amount) you are going to need new brakes and tires at some point.
Certainly. But you don't count both depreciation and repairs, because you only pay one to the extent that you don't pay the other. If you sell the car straight away then the fact that the brake pads are at 62.5% instead of 63% is the next owner's problem, and he is willing to pay you slightly less for the car as a result of the added miles (depreciation). If instead you keep the car for many years, so that you still own it when it ultimately needs brake pads, then you will have to pay for brake pads slightly sooner than you would otherwise, but this is offset by the fact that the amount of depreciation caused by the added miles becomes negligible as the value of the vehicle (and thus the amount of depreciation caused by a higher odometer reading) approaches zero. That is to say, if you sell a vehicle for ~$18,000 with 36,000 miles on it, adding 225 miles might reduce the market value by ~$12. If you keep it for several more years so that when you sell it, it has 120,000 miles on it and is only worth ~$2000, the market value might then only go down by ~$1 for every extra 225 miles. And the $11 difference approximately paid for 225 miles worth of brake pads, tires, repairs, etc. -- the approximation being good to the extent that the blue book value is a fair representation of the market value and the market value is a fair representation of the actual cost of the impairment of the condition of the vehicle as a result of the added miles.
The investopedia numbers are trying to account for sunk costs like the purchase price of the car, the cost of buying insurance, tax, title and license, etc. If the question is how much it costs to put an extra 225 miles on the vehicle once you already own it, those numbers are overinflated, because you pay the sunk costs whether you drive the extra miles or not.
As I already explained, the linear costs are largely reflected in the depreciation already accounted for -- the blue book value goes down because the next owner knows he will have to replace the brake pads and tires sooner, etc. Moreover, this is highway driving. Traffic permitting, you can get on the highway in Boston, set the cruise control and not use the brakes until you get to the off ramp in New York.
I'll give you the oil change, because it has to be done frequently enough that it won't be reflected in the blue book value, but a $30 oil change every 3000 miles is 1c/mile. Are we really arguing over $2.25?
And the $49 ticket one month in advance is the Northeast Regional. The premise of the discussion is that the Accela Express is just as fast as driving, and it costs $99.
If enough people get pissed off with poor service then other companies will jump at the chance to fill the void.
Right, so that the increased competition will drive down prices and increase value for consumers.
Except that the prospective competitor knows that it entering the market would increase competition and reduce margins. And making a huge up front capital outlay in order to enter a market that would consequently have low margin is not conducive to making a good ROI, so the prospective competitor declines to enter the market.
self defense??
Self defense would imply that the retaliation would stop the attack. It fairly obviously wouldn't, because it doesn't incapacitate the attackers. No matter what you do to the attacker's computer, at worst he just has to format it and start over, and if the attacker isn't an idiot he has backups. Which means you bought maybe a couple hours before you're back to square one. Maybe a couple days or a week if you disable a botnet. But now now the attacker (who may very well be better at this than you and have less to lose) is irate and more likely to wantonly destroy your data.
The only answer to "cyber attacks" is to keep your systems secure and, failing that, to keep good backups. All this noise about retaliation and law enforcement and whatever else is just a distraction -- if your systems are sufficiently secure then you have nothing to worry about, and if they're blatantly insecure then you reap what you sow.
For a family of 5 in a jalopy of course it's cheaper to drive. But that is a silly test. How many cars do you see on the road full of five people?
Five people is just making the point. The cost of the train ticket for two adults is still ~$200, which is still 5-10 times as much.
If you have one or two people and you factor in depreciation of you nice new mercedes due to added millage, maintenance (brakes, tires, oil changes, car washes, washer fluid, wear and tear on every other bit of the car) possibility of an accident and the expenses related to that, chance of a break down and being stranded on the side of the road with zombies chasing you etc etc it makes for a better case for the train...
You're accusing me of cherry picking and then trying to count depreciation on a Mercedes?
The reduction in the trade in blue book value on a 2008 Ford Explorer (and most other proletariat-achievable vehicles) between 36000 and 36225 miles was $0. Adding 550 miles reduced the value by $25, so figure half of that for our 225 mile trip. That brings the SUV trip total to ~$50 from ~$38. And claiming both depreciation and wear and tear is double counting, since the wear and tear is the reason for the depreciation -- either you trade it in and the added wear and tear is the next owner's problem or you keep it until the wheels fall off and depreciation is irrelevant.
Likewise, the cost of an accident or breakdown are both negligible per highway mile given their probability and the fact that insurance pays for most damage, and partially offset by the fact that trains can get into accidents or break down too (which, though less probable, affect a far larger number of people).
The fact is that rail only works in well-designed cities without urban sprawl. Mass transit works locally in NYC because it was planned that way from the beginning -- there was metro rail in the 19th century and a subway under construction by the turn of the 20th. Cities like Los Angeles and Houston will always have crap mass transit. And rail between cities is pretty useless if in most of the cities you can't get to or from the train station.
The Acela Express from Boston to NYC takes about the same time as driving, despite the fact that it makes a detour to Providence.
The trip by car is about 225 miles. Figure gas costs $4/gallon. If you've got one of those fuel sucking SUVs that only gets 25 MPG highway, you're paying $36. If you've got a hybrid it's half that much.
So your family of five is taking a trip to NYC from Boston. SUV: ~$40, Hybrid: ~$20, AmTrak: ~$400. The train would be great if it didn't cost 10 to 20 times as much money.
Whatever you think of global warming, pollution is nasty, and giving us such delightful things as asthma.
Most "pollution" today (excepting CO2) is emphatically not from modern cars. The air in most major cities is dirtier than the exhaust from a modern car with modern emissions controls.
Today's pollution comes from coal plants built a half century ago, virtually unregulated marine diesel engines in harbors, petrochemical industry plants, etc. It's not cars. And if we would shut down or retrofit the old plants and prohibit highly sulfur-contaminated fuels, most of it would go away.
Of course, that would slightly raise energy costs, so why bother?
Riiiight, because when your choices are "Rich corrupt POS corporate ass kisser" A or B you can change the system by voting.
So vote in the primary, before your choices are so limited?
Capitalism, it's what's for dinner. Want something else? Go be born to someone else, or embrace a different economic system. Mmm, capitalism. Goes down easy, comes up hard.
It wouldn't be a problem if it was just capitalism. The problem is that China is a company and a country. There is nobody there to enforce antitrust laws. You like your cheap stuff today, but what happens if they dump cheap goods on the market below cost until everyone else goes bust, and then raise the price once no one is left who knows how to make it?
The problem that I see for China is that without having to do the R&D, they get the current tech, understand it, maybe make some improvements to that tech. However, I'm not sure if China has the capability to keep up with other global companies, companies that are investing for future technologies. If China doesn't steal those plans, they'll start to fall behind again, which creates a nice purchasing loop for those global companies.
You're assuming US companies will still have any revenue with which to fund R&D. We're not talking about microprocessors here -- the technology doesn't change that fast. The 747 is from 1969. That's the year we first landed on the moon. If China starts selling five year old technology for half price, five years worth of aircraft "innovation" isn't going to make up for the price difference.
I really don't think they'll turn off Flash for a long time; there are still tons of people using ancient browsers that have no HTML5 video support. I'm looking at you, IE version 9. There are still XP users who, if they don't use something other than IE, will not get IE9.
Right, so those users will go to YouTube and see a message that says "you need Chrome Frame with the WebM plugin to view this page, click here to install (free!)" just like they see on any number of pages today if they don't have Flash installed.
It's probably true to say that the different UI paradigms available on a portable device as compared to a desktop or console, are so different that you'd only be carrying over the art and media if you were hoping to write something common to both.
I don't know, I mean clearly you want to make different design choices based on whether you have a keyboard and mouse vs. a touchscreen or a 26" widescreen vs. a 4" phone, but Linux is Linux. More to the point, if you're already making versions of your software that will run on both OS X and Android, the extra work necessary to get it working on desktop Linux is likely to be minimal. Or conversely, if you have it working on desktop Linux and iOS, you can easily port it to Android.
My point was that those 2% are not on the whole gamers, by definition, because if they were they wouldn't be running Linux.
More likely they use Linux 95% of the time but have a Windows partition or VM somewhere for the software that won't run native on Linux or in WINE. But having to fire up Windows for just one program is very annoying. Which means that if it comes down to a choice between one of two games, and one includes a native Linux version, that one gets the sale.
In addition, you're assuming that because someone uses Linux they won't buy games. Maybe they don't buy games because most games don't run on Linux, and they can't be bothered to maintain a Windows instance? Or because they can't stand Microsoft products? Again, the fact that there aren't a lot of games for Linux means that anyone who produces one can capture a larger portion of that market.
Uh... porting kernel stuff between linux and OS X (driver wise) is pretty much a re-write.
Yes, if you define the relevant code as the portion that needs to be rewritten, the relevant code has to be entirely rewritten.
What % of desktops are Linux? 2%? It's not worth the development effort for a mainstream consumer product, especially given that a fair number of that 2% aren't gamers anyway (if they were, they'd be on Windows!).
You say 2% like it's a small percentage, but in absolute terms it's a large number of people. Millions. And if you have something that runs on OS X, getting it to run on Linux is not a herculean endeavor. It's not like they have to rewrite everything from scratch. In non-outlier cases it would have a positive ROI.
Add to that the fact that most games aren't released for Linux, which means that if yours is, you're likely to get proportionally more sales than on other platforms because there is less competition. Plus the goodwill you build with customers by supporting their preferred platforms. Plus it puts your company in a good position if e.g. some Android derivative or any other Linux-based OS makes it onto a large number of gaming-capable devices all of a sudden, because you already have your product tested and ready while your competitors are scrambling to add Linux support.
If you had any patents that you believe WebM is infringing on, suing _now_ build be totally stupid. You would wait until WebM is a lot, lot bigger.
It depends what your intention is. If you're a patent troll with one patent who just wants the biggest payout, sure. But if you're someone who wants H.264 to win out over WebM, whether because you have a large number of patents you're collecting royalties on for H.264 or because you're invested in hardware that only decodes H.264 or for whatever other reason, you want to stamp out WebM before it takes root. You have to do it now.
And those are the people anybody cares about. The solitary patent trolls are a wash because they can afflict either format.
....for whatever reason. People signed on to Facebook with their real names.
It's the first popular social network where you can actually find people from real life.
I've heard this before, but why does that make them different? Why can't the Next Big Thing also use real names, if that is such a required feature?
And it seems like "real names" is one of the things that makes Facebook so annoying. Nobody wants "mom" or hiring managers reading the messages intended for drinking buddies. People hate being forced to choose between turning down friend requests from certain real friends and having to sanitize everything they write because everyone you know will be reading it.
Or to put it a different way, what's so hard about telling your friends, in person, through email, or using Facebook, that your user ID on some new service is joe@example.com?
I don't believe that Facebook is worth the valuation financial media (and institutions) are touting today (>$50B). And I'm not sure Goldman intends to keep its investment in Facebook for a long time. I suppose they are trying to find as many suckers as they can, push Facebook through IPO with share price inflated several times, then sell their investment with profit to unsuspecting public, pension funds etc. (a.k.a. suckers), collect fees/profits on it and leave everyone with the bag.
This. "Social networking" websites are not long-term investments. There was once a time when everybody thought that no one would ever catch up to the market share of AOL instant messenger. It wasn't two years ago that all the kids were using Myspace. How is Facebook different?
I think we are increasingly moving toward a model where people will subscribe to sources of information/entertainment if they don't want to see the ads, or they will get a free version that includes ads (and possibly presents other limitations in format or content).
Wouldn't surprise me to see Wikipedia go this way.
Honestly, I would expect them to stay just the way they are, if they want to badly enough. Think about it: They're already the fifth most popular website. They are unlikely to become substantially more popular than that, which means that their operation costs are already close to their peak level. Now consider this:
1) The cost of bandwidth and servers, which has got to be some large fraction of their expenses, go down over time.
2) They made their financing goal for this year, a year in which by (1) their costs are likely to be higher than in future years.
Also, $16M in the scheme of things is not a lot of money. If that's their yearly budget then all it would take is one billionaire to provide them a $350M or so endowment in a will or something and they would be set forever just on the interest. (That is, once interest rates get back above 0% again.)
Realistically, the biggest threat to Wikipedia is ISPs violating network neutrality. If Wikipedia had to pay whatever tithe each ISP decided they were entitled to in order to reach their subjects, that could explode their costs pretty quickly and require them to seek other sources of funding.
You wouldn't consider it acceptable if your company just fired you and a lot of other people , just because a machine can do your job faster and cheaper.
Why not? That's why they make unemployment insurance: You get some time to go out and find a job doing something else. And if you aren't qualified for anything else, that's why they make state-subsidized universities. There are always other jobs -- if we ever get to a point where there aren't, it will be because literally everything is made by machines, and therefore everything is effectively non-scarce and can be had for no money, so who needs a job?
It would be acceptable if they slowly replaced people with machines ( for example when they retire )
It will never work that way. First of all, doing it that way retards progress for a generation and makes everybody pay more than necessary for goods in the meantime. But more relevantly, if existing incumbents refuse to adopt the new technologies until their workers retire (say they have union contracts requiring it), someone else will just start a new mill that uses the labor saving devices and the company that does what you want will soon go out of business.
Although they had the right intentions: machinery lowered the pay and job security of the workers for the benefit of the mill owners.
How is that possibly "the right intentions"? Labor saving technologies are the reason we aren't all subsistence farmers. They are, almost to the exclusion of anything else, the way people on "the bottom" can increase their standard of living.
He's probably just playing hardball with Microsoft for a discount. You may notice that every time some country announces that it's moving to Linux, they inevitably announce, 3 months later, that they changed their mind and are sticking with Microsoft.
Are you sure it isn't the other way around? A large entity transitioning to Linux is very bad news for Microsoft. Right now Windows has several advantages over Linux. We all know what they are: Windows runs legacy Win32 software better than Linux with WINE, MS Office is the de facto standard document format, etc. Insert whatever reasons you have for why Windows is on more PCs than Linux.
The problem for Microsoft is that if a large entity with a lot of resources makes a serious push for Linux everywhere, those resources get behind fixing those issues. And, especially with governments, they have no good reason not to push their changes upstream to avoid having to maintain a fork that slowly diverges from the public tree.
So if a large entity announces that it's transitioning to Linux, Microsoft has a real incentive to do anything they can to stop it. Free licenses, free services, free bags of cash money, anything. Because it's better for their bottom line to give stuff away to a government here or there than to sit by as that government makes enterprise-wide Linux "work" while demonstrating as much to the world.
If what you're suggesting is actually what's going on then that is very bad for MS, because their strategy only works when hardly anybody threatens to go Linux. If governments and large corporations left and right are using it as a bargaining chip to vitiate Microsoft's licensing revenues then they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they keep offering sweetheart deals to everybody then they destroy their revenue base, but if they don't then some number of entities will start actually making the transition and the more who do, the more the others realize that it's doable.