You may be the exception; except for certain trades they are prefect for the average persons's daily use (commuting, shopping, going out to eat/play/entertain). What they're lousy for is that one day a week or month when you need to carry more than 2 people, or a lot of cargo. At that point it's useless.
If they weren't $100,000, I'd have one. Hell, if Aptera ever actually built an automobile I'd consider one. Right now I drive an F-150 but I only need a truck (at most) twice a week. I pay the penalty (at 12MPG) because it doesn't make financial sense to purchase a car with better mileage for the 80% of the time I don't need the capacity.
What phone (or any digital electronic item) isn't it on? Practically every electronic device that can be tampered with has a "warranty void if removed" sticker on it. Those that don't usually have it implied, or in the warranty terms. If you alter or disassemble an electronic item, it's pretty unlikely that the warranty will be honored.
This SD card isn't a consumer-usable slot, it's the internal phone memory. They've just chosen (presumably for economic reasons) not to solder the chips to the board.
Easy - you build phones with the "sweet spot" memory today, but in 6 months they look far behind in capacity. Instead of scrapping a containerload of $300 phones, you upgrade them with $10 of memory and sell them.
Sure you might save a little with onboard memory, but this leaves the market segmentation decision until later.
the heat shield is a significant risk as there is no vacuum chamber on earth large enough to fully test it.
There was an analogous problem on Hubble (not wanting to do an end-to-end test due to the facilities required) which is one of the reasons the flawed mirror was not caught before deployment.
Sure, vacuum chambers are expensive to build. Is it worth significantly hampering a $6B project to avoid? There was a cartoon that someone taped to the wall where I worked at GSFC "back in the day" that showed a mouse in a lab coat poking a mouse trap. The caption was "One test is worth a thousand expert opinions."
The goal, theoretically, would be to save money. You could eliminate tens of thousands of military positions, saving countless billions of dollars. Of course, you'd end up with a bunch of unemployed workers with no useful training dumped on the streets.
The down side would be how much each of these cost, and what kinds of maintenance would be required. Saving 1-2 man-years per suit that might require 1/4-1/2 a man year of [more highly trained/expensive] labor per year to keep it running, plus the power costs, seems to suggest a very, very long payback period.
As I understand patent law (that is to say, very surficially), you may build anything provided that it is for perosonal (or perhaps the term is "non-commercial") use.
Should you build it for someone else, you would be considered in commerce, and subject to licensing restrictions.
IP restrictions vary quite a bit between various forms of IP, mostly because the laws were written at different times, with different technology. For example, you can rent video works, but not audio works; however you can lend audio works as well (ie Libraries). If you get rights to reproduce or use an audio clip (aka mechanical rights), it does not automatically extend to using it combined with video (which required synchronization rights).
In the case of the super spoon, I could make as many as I wanted for my kitchen, just as I can make my own airbag deployment module or ergonomic gel shoe insert in my shop, exactly following the description in their respective patents. I can't make them and sell them, though.
I'm going to respond to a sibling post here, as it gets to my problem with work-fare:
1) Most of those people are nearly unemployable. They have no skills, are utterly unreliable, and are often incapacitated (by disability or the need to care for offspring) 2) If you put them to work you'll probably not be taking jobs away from government workers, but from private industry. Much work in gov't is done through private contractors, and many "productive" jobs you could get the people to do are being done by regular companies. There are only so many jobs to do, and you'd just be shuffling the chairs.
I agree with you that cuts probably need to be made in entitlements and fixed spending, because we'll never dig out way out using only discretionary spending - not even if we doubled taxes.
Personally, I have no fear that the tax for those above $250k will affect the economy. I also have no fear about somehow being "cursed" enough to end up in that bracket. I'm already in the top 10%of earners, but I never expect to hit that income level. If someone want's to pitch me into that level, though, I think I'll be able to manage.;-)
I think the FCC and FTC should require that the allowable advertised rate/catchphrase for any mobile provider should be limited to the SLOWEST installed cell in their network.
I'd say that Google doesn't give away anything for free. They have the infrastructure and talent to make a sub-system - they've done it for other government entities.
When given a foothold into an organization with two million employees at $50-$150/yr for email services, I'd say they just might find that appealing - even without the ad revenue.
This won't get any better until you require everyone who flies to go through it. None of the private aircraft passengers are required to endure this, nor are any legislators. That means that everyone with power, and everyone who controls power, are exempt.
Until that changes, expect airport "security" to get more annoying.
Wow. First, I'm impressed that you make enough money to lose 40% to taxes. I've never known anyone to pay more than about 25% of their income in federal taxes (they made well over $500,000/yr). You probably have state taxes. MD was pretty rough at ~5-6% of actual gross income. Cali might be the worst - it's close to 8% (top bracket is 11% iirc).
Note: When I lived in CA a decade ago - before the Bush tax cuts - My wife and I made $120k+/- and had no deductions (renters, no kids). We paid 10% federal and 5-6% state on our gross income.
So you've got 25% fed, 8% state, and 7.5% FICA (I'm assuming you count that as a tax) - but that doesn't jive, 'cause once you hit $80-100k, FICA drops to just medicare which is only 1.5%. What else is getting taken out?
Here's what I don't understand. You asked for:
In this world I want something back that affects me directly and personally, i.e. a retirement plan that is immune from market manipulation, health care even when I'm unemployed, etc.
Well, the 7.5% you pay (and the 7.5% your employer pays) for FICA goes to the retirement plan that is immune from market manipulation known as Social Security. You also seem to want health care even when you're unemployed, and that's called medicaid. The check you get when you're unemployed? That's part of FUTA (and SUTA) which is a tax paid by your employer.
Before those taxes, nobody footed the bill. The rich and powerful didn't give a shot about the little guy. You were at the mercy of local charities, and people died of malnutrition and illnesses which were easily curable.
What bugs me is people who think they pay too much, but use an inordinate amount of taxpayer resources. People with children: I'm looking at you. Every child that gets sent to a public school costs about $10,000 a year. Attend an in-state college? That counts, too. I know very few people who actually pay more than $20,000 in taxes, but a lot of people who have 2 or more kids. And to top it off, for each kid you have, you actually get a tax *reduction*. One of my employees makes $50k, has two kids (not in school yet), and pays essentially zero federal and state income taxes. But I digress...
You're the guy who tried to figure out if he could have all the fractional cents from interest bearing bank accounts deposited to an account with your name.
I still organize like humans have done for a couple hundred years - in files. I have a filing cabinet with all the bits I like to save - manuals, humorous bits, medical records, Christmas receipts. Everything digital is on a server - in similarly labeled folders.
I've started using Evernote for the stuff that doesn't seem to "fit" anywhere else, but I still organize it. I don't believe in the "throw it in a box and use search". That's a lazy way to keep more than you need, and to wade mindlessly through non-pertinent data. It doesn't play well with others, so - for example - I still have to enter data into my contact book even after I scan it into EN. I'm to old to start over and put everything in, and I don't trust the data format anyway.
For day to day stuff, Google calendar/mail/tasks is what keeps things running. I'm not really a "cloud" kind of person, and occasionally it bugs me that it could all be gone, but if I lost everything at Google today, it would be only the fleeting bits of daily life, as anything of value I strip out and store separately.
My advice - don't trust computer labels and don't trust the cloud. Make a solid folder system for your files - hard and soft - and stick to it. Back up the stuff you can't re-create, it's actually not that hard (I have less than 70GB of data that really matters, and half of that is probably not all that significant). Every few years, make sure you go through and prune the tree to get rid of stuff that really doesn't matter anymore.
To gain the maximum effect, you would need to know how far to back up, since different flight paths of the ball take different times. More importantly, you can't be wrong by even a fraction of a second the wrong direction or you will not have "tagged up" after the ball was dropped. This latter bit is probably the most important point, especially since you must be seen tagging up after the ball is dropped.
My supposition is that the error involved is greater than amount of time gained on the trip towards home plate, and the number of actual plays made at home which involve the timing difference does not compensate for the added risk.
Certain technologies have pretty long shelf lives - Hard Drives are one of those. Tape Backups and CDs are another.
Sure SSDs are getting cheaper, but so are hard drives. Hard drives are now a nickel a GB, half the price of just a year ago. The best SSD prices still look like they're 40x as expensive.
Sure, they'll take over the small drive / low power / slim profile market, especially for expensive hardware (SteveJobsthankyouverymuch). But as we do more with large audio/video/photo files, out appetite for storage is still a 5-10 years away for cost effective SSDs at TODAY's rate of use.
Just look at the usenet. DivX was king, with only hard core nuts going with full DVD rips. Then HD was here and everything was recompressed to 720p x264. Now it's mostly 1080p x264 recodes and straight 26GB AVC rips. Our use is definitely not slowing down, and spinning platters is the only thing that can give us that kind capacity for the foreseeable future.
Don't tell that to VZW marketing - they're claiming "4G" will be "network wide" soon. Though, just at 4G is now a bit of an exaggeration, is suspect soon is also valid only for very large values of soon.
(FWIW, I'm an ATT customer; Verizon coverage sucks everywhere except population centers. It happens to suck slightly less than ATT in those marginal areas, but in my area not enough to make a difference)
Sorry, I was thinking more of the larger applications which may find themselves needing/wanting to be on the app store, even through they already have an established distribution channel. Though, to be hones, the big players probably have the clout to negotiate a better deal.
There's no doubt this is a good deal for the small shops, where distribution is mostly an expensive distraction. 30% is a very reasonable number if you're a developer comparing channels. 30% of every dollar spent on software for your hardware is a coup of awesome proportions for Apple (or any vendor).
That's where the Large-Scale comes in. Compared to the land area of the US (i.e. Verizon's planned roll-out), they're what we would call "test markets."
Exactly why this is happening. The broadcast networks found that they could double dip by charging the cable providers for their content, after it was already paid for by the advertisers. It seems entirely logical (to them) that they should get money from every service which delivers their content to the consumer, even if it happens to be their own website. They're looking to get $$$ from all these players.
Slashdot Mirror
You may be the exception; except for certain trades they are prefect for the average persons's daily use (commuting, shopping, going out to eat/play/entertain). What they're lousy for is that one day a week or month when you need to carry more than 2 people, or a lot of cargo. At that point it's useless.
If they weren't $100,000, I'd have one. Hell, if Aptera ever actually built an automobile I'd consider one. Right now I drive an F-150 but I only need a truck (at most) twice a week. I pay the penalty (at 12MPG) because it doesn't make financial sense to purchase a car with better mileage for the 80% of the time I don't need the capacity.
The drop out, would that be Bill Gates, Dean Kamen, Michel Dell, Larry Elliston, or Steve Jobs?
Okay, admittedly not all of those guys made it through two full years before washing out of college.
What phone (or any digital electronic item) isn't it on? Practically every electronic device that can be tampered with has a "warranty void if removed" sticker on it. Those that don't usually have it implied, or in the warranty terms. If you alter or disassemble an electronic item, it's pretty unlikely that the warranty will be honored.
This SD card isn't a consumer-usable slot, it's the internal phone memory. They've just chosen (presumably for economic reasons) not to solder the chips to the board.
Easy - you build phones with the "sweet spot" memory today, but in 6 months they look far behind in capacity. Instead of scrapping a containerload of $300 phones, you upgrade them with $10 of memory and sell them.
Sure you might save a little with onboard memory, but this leaves the market segmentation decision until later.
the heat shield is a significant risk as there is no vacuum chamber on earth large enough to fully test it.
There was an analogous problem on Hubble (not wanting to do an end-to-end test due to the facilities required) which is one of the reasons the flawed mirror was not caught before deployment.
Sure, vacuum chambers are expensive to build. Is it worth significantly hampering a $6B project to avoid? There was a cartoon that someone taped to the wall where I worked at GSFC "back in the day" that showed a mouse in a lab coat poking a mouse trap. The caption was "One test is worth a thousand expert opinions."
That depends entirely on how you fold it.
The goal, theoretically, would be to save money. You could eliminate tens of thousands of military positions, saving countless billions of dollars. Of course, you'd end up with a bunch of unemployed workers with no useful training dumped on the streets.
The down side would be how much each of these cost, and what kinds of maintenance would be required. Saving 1-2 man-years per suit that might require 1/4-1/2 a man year of [more highly trained/expensive] labor per year to keep it running, plus the power costs, seems to suggest a very, very long payback period.
As I understand patent law (that is to say, very surficially), you may build anything provided that it is for perosonal (or perhaps the term is "non-commercial") use.
Should you build it for someone else, you would be considered in commerce, and subject to licensing restrictions.
IP restrictions vary quite a bit between various forms of IP, mostly because the laws were written at different times, with different technology. For example, you can rent video works, but not audio works; however you can lend audio works as well (ie Libraries). If you get rights to reproduce or use an audio clip (aka mechanical rights), it does not automatically extend to using it combined with video (which required synchronization rights).
In the case of the super spoon, I could make as many as I wanted for my kitchen, just as I can make my own airbag deployment module or ergonomic gel shoe insert in my shop, exactly following the description in their respective patents. I can't make them and sell them, though.
No, that's the wrong Alice.
(sorry, just watched Burton's version over the weekend)
I'm going to respond to a sibling post here, as it gets to my problem with work-fare:
1) Most of those people are nearly unemployable. They have no skills, are utterly unreliable, and are often incapacitated (by disability or the need to care for offspring)
2) If you put them to work you'll probably not be taking jobs away from government workers, but from private industry. Much work in gov't is done through private contractors, and many "productive" jobs you could get the people to do are being done by regular companies. There are only so many jobs to do, and you'd just be shuffling the chairs.
I agree with you that cuts probably need to be made in entitlements and fixed spending, because we'll never dig out way out using only discretionary spending - not even if we doubled taxes.
Personally, I have no fear that the tax for those above $250k will affect the economy. I also have no fear about somehow being "cursed" enough to end up in that bracket. I'm already in the top 10%of earners, but I never expect to hit that income level. If someone want's to pitch me into that level, though, I think I'll be able to manage. ;-)
I think the FCC and FTC should require that the allowable advertised rate/catchphrase for any mobile provider should be limited to the SLOWEST installed cell in their network.
I'd say that Google doesn't give away anything for free. They have the infrastructure and talent to make a sub-system - they've done it for other government entities.
When given a foothold into an organization with two million employees at $50-$150/yr for email services, I'd say they just might find that appealing - even without the ad revenue.
"You LIKE this"
This won't get any better until you require everyone who flies to go through it. None of the private aircraft passengers are required to endure this, nor are any legislators. That means that everyone with power, and everyone who controls power, are exempt.
Until that changes, expect airport "security" to get more annoying.
Wow. First, I'm impressed that you make enough money to lose 40% to taxes. I've never known anyone to pay more than about 25% of their income in federal taxes (they made well over $500,000/yr). You probably have state taxes. MD was pretty rough at ~5-6% of actual gross income. Cali might be the worst - it's close to 8% (top bracket is 11% iirc).
Note: When I lived in CA a decade ago - before the Bush tax cuts - My wife and I made $120k+/- and had no deductions (renters, no kids). We paid 10% federal and 5-6% state on our gross income.
So you've got 25% fed, 8% state, and 7.5% FICA (I'm assuming you count that as a tax) - but that doesn't jive, 'cause once you hit $80-100k, FICA drops to just medicare which is only 1.5%. What else is getting taken out?
Here's what I don't understand. You asked for:
In this world I want something back that affects me directly and personally, i.e. a retirement plan that is immune from market manipulation, health care even when I'm unemployed, etc.
Well, the 7.5% you pay (and the 7.5% your employer pays) for FICA goes to the retirement plan that is immune from market manipulation known as Social Security. You also seem to want health care even when you're unemployed, and that's called medicaid. The check you get when you're unemployed? That's part of FUTA (and SUTA) which is a tax paid by your employer.
Before those taxes, nobody footed the bill. The rich and powerful didn't give a shot about the little guy. You were at the mercy of local charities, and people died of malnutrition and illnesses which were easily curable.
What bugs me is people who think they pay too much, but use an inordinate amount of taxpayer resources. People with children: I'm looking at you. Every child that gets sent to a public school costs about $10,000 a year. Attend an in-state college? That counts, too. I know very few people who actually pay more than $20,000 in taxes, but a lot of people who have 2 or more kids. And to top it off, for each kid you have, you actually get a tax *reduction*. One of my employees makes $50k, has two kids (not in school yet), and pays essentially zero federal and state income taxes. But I digress...
You're the guy who tried to figure out if he could have all the fractional cents from interest bearing bank accounts deposited to an account with your name.
I still organize like humans have done for a couple hundred years - in files. I have a filing cabinet with all the bits I like to save - manuals, humorous bits, medical records, Christmas receipts. Everything digital is on a server - in similarly labeled folders.
I've started using Evernote for the stuff that doesn't seem to "fit" anywhere else, but I still organize it. I don't believe in the "throw it in a box and use search". That's a lazy way to keep more than you need, and to wade mindlessly through non-pertinent data. It doesn't play well with others, so - for example - I still have to enter data into my contact book even after I scan it into EN. I'm to old to start over and put everything in, and I don't trust the data format anyway.
For day to day stuff, Google calendar/mail/tasks is what keeps things running. I'm not really a "cloud" kind of person, and occasionally it bugs me that it could all be gone, but if I lost everything at Google today, it would be only the fleeting bits of daily life, as anything of value I strip out and store separately.
My advice - don't trust computer labels and don't trust the cloud. Make a solid folder system for your files - hard and soft - and stick to it. Back up the stuff you can't re-create, it's actually not that hard (I have less than 70GB of data that really matters, and half of that is probably not all that significant). Every few years, make sure you go through and prune the tree to get rid of stuff that really doesn't matter anymore.
To gain the maximum effect, you would need to know how far to back up, since different flight paths of the ball take different times. More importantly, you can't be wrong by even a fraction of a second the wrong direction or you will not have "tagged up" after the ball was dropped. This latter bit is probably the most important point, especially since you must be seen tagging up after the ball is dropped.
My supposition is that the error involved is greater than amount of time gained on the trip towards home plate, and the number of actual plays made at home which involve the timing difference does not compensate for the added risk.
Certain technologies have pretty long shelf lives - Hard Drives are one of those. Tape Backups and CDs are another.
Sure SSDs are getting cheaper, but so are hard drives. Hard drives are now a nickel a GB, half the price of just a year ago. The best SSD prices still look like they're 40x as expensive.
Sure, they'll take over the small drive / low power / slim profile market, especially for expensive hardware (SteveJobsthankyouverymuch). But as we do more with large audio/video/photo files, out appetite for storage is still a 5-10 years away for cost effective SSDs at TODAY's rate of use.
Just look at the usenet. DivX was king, with only hard core nuts going with full DVD rips. Then HD was here and everything was recompressed to 720p x264. Now it's mostly 1080p x264 recodes and straight 26GB AVC rips. Our use is definitely not slowing down, and spinning platters is the only thing that can give us that kind capacity for the foreseeable future.
Actually, the definition of detonation is the advancement of the reaction front at a speed greater than that of sound in the medium.
Don't tell that to VZW marketing - they're claiming "4G" will be "network wide" soon. Though, just at 4G is now a bit of an exaggeration, is suspect soon is also valid only for very large values of soon.
(FWIW, I'm an ATT customer; Verizon coverage sucks everywhere except population centers. It happens to suck slightly less than ATT in those marginal areas, but in my area not enough to make a difference)
Sorry, I was thinking more of the larger applications which may find themselves needing/wanting to be on the app store, even through they already have an established distribution channel. Though, to be hones, the big players probably have the clout to negotiate a better deal.
There's no doubt this is a good deal for the small shops, where distribution is mostly an expensive distraction. 30% is a very reasonable number if you're a developer comparing channels. 30% of every dollar spent on software for your hardware is a coup of awesome proportions for Apple (or any vendor).
That's where the Large-Scale comes in. Compared to the land area of the US (i.e. Verizon's planned roll-out), they're what we would call "test markets."
After the whole "map" debacle, this should make them feel a bit better, regardless of how fast their service really is.
Exactly why this is happening. The broadcast networks found that they could double dip by charging the cable providers for their content, after it was already paid for by the advertisers. It seems entirely logical (to them) that they should get money from every service which delivers their content to the consumer, even if it happens to be their own website. They're looking to get $$$ from all these players.