About the only place it is (marginally) suitable is for a single planet based medium, and even then latency, interference and bandwidth constraints are bad compared to alternatives.
WTF are you talking about? What alternatives? Right now, there are none. You can talk about sci-fi comm stuff all you want, but those aren't real, they're only theoretical at best. "Gravitonic/proto-singularity channels"?? WTF? There's no known way to generate or alter gravity, aside from adding and subtracting mass. "instantaneous-irrespective-of-distance"? That's FTL, which is currently theorized to be impossible.
Even between planets (in the same star system), RF seems to work well enough. We're able to communicate with the New Horizons probe beyond Pluto with it. It does seem, however, that in the future it might make sense to switch to laser-based communications between colonies. However, we'd still need RF to communicate with the laser satellites, since lasers don't work so well through clouds, or if the destination colony is on the other side of the planet from your current location.
You do have a good point that it's possible our current understanding of physics is very incomplete and better methods (even FTL ones) of communication exist. But to say that RF is "unsuited" for communications is just ridiculous. We're doing just fine with it on this planet, and there are no known alternatives which are better for latency, interference, and bandwidth (including lasers; they suck when you have to deal with atmosphere and weather, or worse being over the horizon from your destination).
First, getting to those resources is even more difficult and costly than going to space and grabbing some asteroids. In space, you only have to deal with containing 1 atm of pressure inside your ship. Underwater, you have to deal with tens or hundreds of atm of pressure. Deep underground (as in below the crust, inside the mantle), you're looking at much higher pressures plus a lot of heat, since it's hot enough down there to melt rock.
Secondly, all the resources are in the crust, not deeper. Deeper than that it's just silicates and then iron. All the most valuable minerals, such as iridium, are in the crust because they came from asteroid impacts eons ago; they weren't part of the planet's formation. Going out and grabbing more asteroids will yield much more of that, far more than we can easily get by digging up our habitat.
According to our understanding of physics, FTL communication is completely impossible. So of course we assume that our understanding of physics is complete and that it is indeed impossible, and since we use radio for communications, we assume the ETs must use radio too.
Exactly. If you trust Microsoft, then just apply the updates and let them spy on you. There's a bunch of people here who claim that this is actually good for you, and that MS is just making sure they understand customer usage better and can improve their software with this information.
If you don't trust Microsoft, then what the heck are you doing trusting their operating system to protect your critical data and privacy?
That's why Volvo and such did so well in the '80s. There was a perception they were more crash worthy, despite no better crash test results.
They were much more crashworthy, it's just that the US tests sucked (and still do, for NHTSA tests).
Oh, and US consumers don't care about rating. They think that they'll buy a bigger car and get safety through mass.
A lot of US consumers are like this, but the Volvo buyers aren't, nor is anyone who pays attention to IIHS tests.
It's not the engineers or car companies can't do it, but they've deliberately designed the rules themselves to make them incompatible with the rest of the world, to help prevent others from selling in the US, and then designed to those inferior rules.
It doesn't seem to be working. Foreign cars seem to dominate auto sales.
I do wonder how much US rules are affecting car design worldwide though. Remember, up through the 80s carmakers who wanted to sell in the US were forced to use those horrible "sealed beam" headlight units because of US government rules, which prevented carmakers from using more stylish and better-performing headlights. When the US finally changed that rule, suddenly body styles changed completely. Over in Europe, they wanted to use more modern headlight housings for a long time but didn't because then they couldn't sell the cars here.
Yeah, the problem is they don't want to do that, because it's "unfair" to people who have old, poorly-maintained cars, because supposedly these cars are either "classics" or they're too poor to afford newer cars. Basically, cars past a certain age are "grandfathered".
Are you talking about profit on apps, or profit on the phones themselves? It's pretty well-known that Apple makes a lot more money in its app store than the Android app store brings in. But that's irrelevant to the phone makers, who don't get any money from that.
I've heard this thing about other Android phone vendors losing money on their devices before. The problem with this is: why would they continue making and selling phones if they're losing money on them? Either they're making money on them somewhere else, or there's something wrong with those numbers, or they all really think their fortunes are going to turn around any day now and they'll be as successful as Samsung (yeah right). Something's wrong here. As you said, business is about money and profit: companies rarely continue to sell stuff at a loss; they might do it for a bit to try to build marketshare and reputation, but for only so long (unless they're making money somewhere else, like the razor-and-blades business model where you sell consumables for inflated prices to more than make up for the "loss leader"). One Android phone maker selling at a loss trying to build their presence in the market is believable; all of them (except Samsung) selling at a loss is not.
Wow, another comment where the responder fails to read my whole comment before responding. I sure am seeing a lot of that these days.
Did you miss the part where I said "Cars probably reached a minimum weight in the late 70s and 80s"? 1980 is 35 years ago. I specified that cars 40+ years old (mainly before the OPEC crisis of '74) were heavier, and tended to be 3000 pounds or so. It was the OPEC crisis which drove fuel economy concerns and suddenly made 1600lb cars popular in the US.
The OP was contending that older (read: 60s--70s American cars, especially those from the "muscle car" era) cars were much heavier than modern cars, and this is actually a bit of a misconception. From what I've read, late 60s Mustangs weighed around 3000 lbs. According to Wikipedia, the 1960 Thunderbird weighed just shy of 4000 lbs. The 1972 T-bird was a pig at over 5000 lbs, but the 1977 cut that down to a bit over 4000. T-birds weren't exactly small cars, but these weights really aren't that out-of-line compared to modern large sedans, and the first-generation Mustang probably isn't any heavier than modern ones (though it is a bit smaller).
For an example of a smaller car, the infamous AMC Gremlin was only 2633 lbs, while the Pacer was 3000 lbs. Most small cars these days are right in that range.
But yes, the 1980s Japanese imports (and European ones too) were very lightweight. It took a while for Americans to try making lightweight cars, and they never made anything as light as the really lightweight Japanese or European small cars.
Then tough! But that mainly applies if you live in California, or certain other states or cities which are emission-controlled. In a lot of places, there's no state emission test, but there is testing in particular cities or metro areas. Virginia is like this I believe; there's no testing of any kind in rural parts of the state, but in the NoVA area (DC suburbs) there is. Arizona is the same way: if you live in Maricopa County (Phoenix metro area), there's emissions testing, but not in the rural parts of the state. See here, in particular #9 under "Exemptions". Of course, most people in AZ live in either Phoenix or Tucson (including their respective metro areas), even though the state has a huge amount of land area outside those places, so most people are covered by this testing, but for those who don't, they're exempt.
However, why would you want something that's not CARB-certified? It's likely a POS in that case. Any company that has a profitable business selling aftermarket exhaust systems is going to have CARB certification for its parts, because CA is easily the largest market for aftermarket car parts like that. As for visual inspection, as long as the parts have CARB certification, they pass.
It depends. If it's a workgroup that's basically working on some side project or research project, they probably don't have any real firm requirements, besides a single manager who has a list of some things he wants to do or try out. Not everyone is working on an actual product.
Also, if it's a support group (like "applications engineering"), there's no actual requirements besides "the customer called today and wants such-and-such ASAP!".
For critical, flagship product development (especially in a more mature industry/company), requirements are usually very well formalized, but a lot of things just aren't like that.
We have big time safety laws on cars which raise the price of the car thousands of dollars, but no real safety rules on motorcylists. It is the law to wear a seatbelt in a car, but a motocyclist doesn't have to wear a helmet. Part of me thinks this is just because we don't want cheap foreign cars competing with expensive brands.
What cheap foreign cars? Chinese cars? Tatas from India? Most foreign cars are more expensive than American cars; American cars are the cheap, crappy ones these days, and have been for a long time. You get a foreign car from Japan or Germany because you want a car that's better engineered, higher quality, will protect you better in a crash, has better fuel economy, will last a lot longer, and has better resale value. Some of these factors have diminished since the 80s (a lot of American cars actually have comparable fuel economy now), but most of this has been the general case for quite a while. How many 20-year old Japanese cars do you still see driving around, compared to 20-year-old Chryslers and Chevys?
The reason we have lots of safety laws for cars is because the vast majority of Americans drive cars (or trucks/SUVs) the vast majority of the time. Very few people drive motorcycles, and many of those only ride on weekends. It's perfectly normal for a government to focus regulation on things that have the greatest impact, or "bang for the buck". Why spend a lot of time and money working on legislation to improve safety for something that very, very few people do, when you can focus your effort on something that hundreds of millions do?
And finally, all decent states DO require helmets.
You have a good point here, but on the other hand, TFS itself said that Blackberry is "struggling". There's lots of companies that sell much less than 1M units a year which aren't "struggling", they make enough profit for the size of their company. It sounds like 1M units a year simply isn't enough for BB to stay profitable. If they're so large they have their own OS team (QNX) and R&D teams, that might not be enough volume for them to stay profitable. Worse, if their marketshare (and absolute unit sales) are trending down instead of up (or at least steady), due to everyone moving to Androids, then that doesn't bode well for them.
Android is only as secure as the phone maker allows. If they keep up with patches and push these out to customers' devices promptly, Android can be quite secure. If they don't bother making any updates after the phone ships (sadly the case with some makers; HTC, I'm looking at you, you fuckers), then of course it's as secure as a sieve. That's the "problem" with Android: it's in the hands of the phone makers, and some do a much better job than others. It's not like the old days with Microsoft, where the OS vendor was the one responsible for this stuff. The vendors have all the source to the OS, and they have total control over what goes into the OS build, and when updates are issued.
So if Blackberry's Android devices are insecure, it's their own fault for doing a shitty job. If they can handle owning and maintaining their own OS (QNX), surely they can devote sufficient resources to staying up-to-date with Android patches.
They have a vastly superior platform. Why toss that out for third-rate garbage?
Well, it's pretty simple really:
Android = profitable (at least for Samsung, they're making a killing) Blackberry/QNX = unprofitable
It doesn't matter how "superior" your product is if you can't get anyone to buy it and you can't make enough money to keep the company going.
It seems to me they (and you) have made the classic mistake of thinking "superiority" will cause a product line to dominate the market, when in fact it's bang-for-buck which does. It doesn't matter how great your product is; if it costs too much and there's a much-cheaper alternative that seems almost as good, people are going to flock to that. That's exactly what happened with Android. Apple/iOS was there first, but it cost a small fortune (remember how much the first iPhones cost?). Then Android phones came out, they looked much like iPhones but were a lot cheaper (and also didn't have a my-way-or-the-highway bent like Apple devices), so now Androids utterly dominate the market, even if they aren't the most profitable. Then there's BB, which mainly just catered to government and big corporations because of the secure email tie-in, and they've been passed up by cheaper and more functional (in most ways) devices that have the whole app-store advantage.
Um, did you even read the summary? They're not tossing out BBOS, this is in addition to it. Moreover, it's not "me-too", they're supposedly adding BB security to Android, to make this more than just yet-another-Android.
Now of course, I'm rather dubious that their efforts are going to pan out here, but just going by the summary, it's certainly not a case of "let's toss out what makes us unique and become another me-too player in a crowded market".
Finally, their big "advantage" (the BB OS and ecosystem and such) doesn't seem to be much of an "advantage" if they're "struggling". If it was such an advantage, they'd have a strong business, even if it doesn't have the most marketshare. There's lots of companies that have very strong and profitable businesses catering to niche markets (such as government). BB doesn't seem to be one of them. Maybe it's just time for them to throw in the towel.
As for Android being a success, those other companies are still making a profit, are they not? They might not be making Samsung profits, but most of them I presume are making some kind of profit, or else they'd be throwing in the towel too.
Usually, if there's some foreign car you can't get here in the US, it's because the manufacturer doesn't want to pay all the money needed to put it through US government crash tests. This usually happens with very expensive, low-volume cars, like the famous Porsche 959 that Bill Gates tried importing and couldn't get licensed to drive on American roads, so it sat in storage for decades. When the carmaker only makes a handful of that kind of car, they're not going to build 5 extra just so they can be crash-tested, unless they really think Americans are going to buy enough of them to make it worthwhile (which for a lot of cars, is a poor bet).
Blind spots are growing as well due to the tiny windows, and so on.
That's why you get a car with blind-spot monitors (radar systems in the back bumper which alert you when someone's in your blind spot).
That doesn't help with the A-pillars though. But you can still get around that by moving your head so you can see around the pillar. When you're turning left, this is something you should be able to do, since the car isn't moving. By contrast, vehicles in your blind spot is a problem when you're moving, usually at highway speeds since the problem is normally lane-changing, something that only happens on multi-lane roads. It's not so easy to shift your body and head around a bit to double-check things when you're moving at 70mph as when you're turning left out of a driveway.
I guess the new requirements for backup cameras sort of cover pedestrian safety to some degree, but I suspect that the need for it has come from the shrinking of car windows to improve the vehicle crash performance.
There's some truth to that, but only some. There's *never* been a car where you could see if there was a small child or dog or whatever right behind your rear bumper, while seated in the driver's seat. That's what these cameras are really for: they have fisheye lenses and let you see absolutely *everything* behind your car. I'd never had one before until I got my current car a few months ago, and it's a god-send. I can parallel park with skill I never had before, because I couldn't see well enough behind my car before to know how much room I had behind me, and having the camera makes it easy. And of course if there's anything behind me as I back up, I can easily see it. I don't even bother looking behind me now (though I do swing my head around to check the sides) as I back up, because the view with the camera is so excellent it's not worth looking in the rearview mirror (plus my rear window is tiny).
In short, we have the technology now so that instead of having a lot of glass (which sucks in collisions and makes your car less crashworthy), we can use cameras and sensors to get even better perception than we ever had with the old designs with larger windows, so why not use it? Even better, it's dirt cheap. Look on Ebay for "rearview camera": there's systems you can buy from China that cost $50 with free shipping from there. Maybe those aren't the greatest quality, but that should give you an idea of just how cheap it is for an automaker, with its huge economies of scale and buying power, to add such a system in at the factory. Considering how much an airbag for instance costs by comparison (even at automaker factory prices, it's a lot more than a rearview camera), and how much a new car costs, there's just no excuse to not have these things on all cars now. It's got to be one of the biggest bang-per-buck deals in auto safety there is. Lots of kids are still run over (usually by their own parents) every year in the US, and don't forget all the fender-benders; rearview cameras can eliminate all those for very little cost.
Actually, you're wrong about cars being lighter. Cars 40 (really more like 45: 40 years ago was just after the OPEC crisis when suddenly Honda Civics became all the rage) years ago were about the same weight as cars now--roughly 3000 pounds. Google it. Cars back then had somewhat heavier body panels and frames, but a lot less other stuff: interior parts, safety equipment, air conditioning, power steering, etc. Cars probably reached a minimum weight in the late 70s and 80s, and have been climbing back up in weight since then, though they've probably gone back down a bit in recent years thanks to higher use of aluminum and high-strength steels.
You're an idiot, and the fact you're been modded "insightful" for what the other responder rightfully calls "Redneck Engineering" is proof that Slashdot is not "news for nerds" any more.
Airbags, brakes, and complex suspension doesn't add a large amount of mass to a car (longer crumple zones and sturdier roll cages do though). Modern, more complex suspensions are actually lighter than the shitty old live-axle suspensions vehicles used to have, and have much lower unsprung mass, but the reason they're used is to improve handling, not to make the car more crashworthy (though this does help avoid crashes). Better brakes do add more unsprung mass but again help avoid crashes.
Americans do spend more time in their cars, and accordingly, you'd think they'd want cars that allow them to survive crashes better. There's no conflict between comfort and crashworthiness; after all, Americans have no problem buying giant, gas-guzzling SUVs which certainly have a mass advantage. The engineering conflict with crashworthiness is with fuel economy, as extra mass works directly against that. However, European cars are obviously safer, even though fuel economy is a much bigger concern in Europe due to higher gas prices as well as higher taxes on vehicles with larger engines. But despite those factors, the Europeans seem to do a much better job engineering cars for crashes than Americans.
Hmm, I must have missed those lines. I thought it was years between these destinations, because why would they bother with hypersleep if it only takes 17 days to get a rescue mission to LV-426?
But yes, 10 months even at lightspeed isn't enough to get to the closest star system (Alpha Centauri) from here, not even halfway.
But now that I think about it, they would need FTL, otherwise why bother sending Colonial Marines to rescue the colonists? By the time they get there at sub-light, they'd be mostly dead from old age.
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About the only place it is (marginally) suitable is for a single planet based medium, and even then latency, interference and bandwidth constraints are bad compared to alternatives.
WTF are you talking about? What alternatives? Right now, there are none. You can talk about sci-fi comm stuff all you want, but those aren't real, they're only theoretical at best. "Gravitonic/proto-singularity channels"?? WTF? There's no known way to generate or alter gravity, aside from adding and subtracting mass. "instantaneous-irrespective-of-distance"? That's FTL, which is currently theorized to be impossible.
Even between planets (in the same star system), RF seems to work well enough. We're able to communicate with the New Horizons probe beyond Pluto with it. It does seem, however, that in the future it might make sense to switch to laser-based communications between colonies. However, we'd still need RF to communicate with the laser satellites, since lasers don't work so well through clouds, or if the destination colony is on the other side of the planet from your current location.
You do have a good point that it's possible our current understanding of physics is very incomplete and better methods (even FTL ones) of communication exist. But to say that RF is "unsuited" for communications is just ridiculous. We're doing just fine with it on this planet, and there are no known alternatives which are better for latency, interference, and bandwidth (including lasers; they suck when you have to deal with atmosphere and weather, or worse being over the horizon from your destination).
First, getting to those resources is even more difficult and costly than going to space and grabbing some asteroids. In space, you only have to deal with containing 1 atm of pressure inside your ship. Underwater, you have to deal with tens or hundreds of atm of pressure. Deep underground (as in below the crust, inside the mantle), you're looking at much higher pressures plus a lot of heat, since it's hot enough down there to melt rock.
Secondly, all the resources are in the crust, not deeper. Deeper than that it's just silicates and then iron. All the most valuable minerals, such as iridium, are in the crust because they came from asteroid impacts eons ago; they weren't part of the planet's formation. Going out and grabbing more asteroids will yield much more of that, far more than we can easily get by digging up our habitat.
How would electrons be any easier? That requires having wires between your communications nodes.
Maybe you're thinking of electromagnetic waves (radio). Those aren't electrons.
According to our understanding of physics, FTL communication is completely impossible. So of course we assume that our understanding of physics is complete and that it is indeed impossible, and since we use radio for communications, we assume the ETs must use radio too.
Exactly. If you trust Microsoft, then just apply the updates and let them spy on you. There's a bunch of people here who claim that this is actually good for you, and that MS is just making sure they understand customer usage better and can improve their software with this information.
If you don't trust Microsoft, then what the heck are you doing trusting their operating system to protect your critical data and privacy?
That's why Volvo and such did so well in the '80s. There was a perception they were more crash worthy, despite no better crash test results.
They were much more crashworthy, it's just that the US tests sucked (and still do, for NHTSA tests).
Oh, and US consumers don't care about rating. They think that they'll buy a bigger car and get safety through mass.
A lot of US consumers are like this, but the Volvo buyers aren't, nor is anyone who pays attention to IIHS tests.
It's not the engineers or car companies can't do it, but they've deliberately designed the rules themselves to make them incompatible with the rest of the world, to help prevent others from selling in the US, and then designed to those inferior rules.
It doesn't seem to be working. Foreign cars seem to dominate auto sales.
I do wonder how much US rules are affecting car design worldwide though. Remember, up through the 80s carmakers who wanted to sell in the US were forced to use those horrible "sealed beam" headlight units because of US government rules, which prevented carmakers from using more stylish and better-performing headlights. When the US finally changed that rule, suddenly body styles changed completely. Over in Europe, they wanted to use more modern headlight housings for a long time but didn't because then they couldn't sell the cars here.
Yeah, the problem is they don't want to do that, because it's "unfair" to people who have old, poorly-maintained cars, because supposedly these cars are either "classics" or they're too poor to afford newer cars. Basically, cars past a certain age are "grandfathered".
Ah, this is a perfect response. Thanks!
I was wondering about that stapling bit myself.
Are you talking about profit on apps, or profit on the phones themselves? It's pretty well-known that Apple makes a lot more money in its app store than the Android app store brings in. But that's irrelevant to the phone makers, who don't get any money from that.
I've heard this thing about other Android phone vendors losing money on their devices before. The problem with this is: why would they continue making and selling phones if they're losing money on them? Either they're making money on them somewhere else, or there's something wrong with those numbers, or they all really think their fortunes are going to turn around any day now and they'll be as successful as Samsung (yeah right). Something's wrong here. As you said, business is about money and profit: companies rarely continue to sell stuff at a loss; they might do it for a bit to try to build marketshare and reputation, but for only so long (unless they're making money somewhere else, like the razor-and-blades business model where you sell consumables for inflated prices to more than make up for the "loss leader"). One Android phone maker selling at a loss trying to build their presence in the market is believable; all of them (except Samsung) selling at a loss is not.
Not big enough apparently, or else they wouldn't be headed for bankruptcy.
Wow, another comment where the responder fails to read my whole comment before responding. I sure am seeing a lot of that these days.
Did you miss the part where I said "Cars probably reached a minimum weight in the late 70s and 80s"? 1980 is 35 years ago. I specified that cars 40+ years old (mainly before the OPEC crisis of '74) were heavier, and tended to be 3000 pounds or so. It was the OPEC crisis which drove fuel economy concerns and suddenly made 1600lb cars popular in the US.
The OP was contending that older (read: 60s--70s American cars, especially those from the "muscle car" era) cars were much heavier than modern cars, and this is actually a bit of a misconception. From what I've read, late 60s Mustangs weighed around 3000 lbs. According to Wikipedia, the 1960 Thunderbird weighed just shy of 4000 lbs. The 1972 T-bird was a pig at over 5000 lbs, but the 1977 cut that down to a bit over 4000. T-birds weren't exactly small cars, but these weights really aren't that out-of-line compared to modern large sedans, and the first-generation Mustang probably isn't any heavier than modern ones (though it is a bit smaller).
For an example of a smaller car, the infamous AMC Gremlin was only 2633 lbs, while the Pacer was 3000 lbs. Most small cars these days are right in that range.
But yes, the 1980s Japanese imports (and European ones too) were very lightweight. It took a while for Americans to try making lightweight cars, and they never made anything as light as the really lightweight Japanese or European small cars.
Then tough! But that mainly applies if you live in California, or certain other states or cities which are emission-controlled. In a lot of places, there's no state emission test, but there is testing in particular cities or metro areas. Virginia is like this I believe; there's no testing of any kind in rural parts of the state, but in the NoVA area (DC suburbs) there is. Arizona is the same way: if you live in Maricopa County (Phoenix metro area), there's emissions testing, but not in the rural parts of the state. See here, in particular #9 under "Exemptions". Of course, most people in AZ live in either Phoenix or Tucson (including their respective metro areas), even though the state has a huge amount of land area outside those places, so most people are covered by this testing, but for those who don't, they're exempt.
However, why would you want something that's not CARB-certified? It's likely a POS in that case. Any company that has a profitable business selling aftermarket exhaust systems is going to have CARB certification for its parts, because CA is easily the largest market for aftermarket car parts like that. As for visual inspection, as long as the parts have CARB certification, they pass.
It depends. If it's a workgroup that's basically working on some side project or research project, they probably don't have any real firm requirements, besides a single manager who has a list of some things he wants to do or try out. Not everyone is working on an actual product.
Also, if it's a support group (like "applications engineering"), there's no actual requirements besides "the customer called today and wants such-and-such ASAP!".
For critical, flagship product development (especially in a more mature industry/company), requirements are usually very well formalized, but a lot of things just aren't like that.
We have big time safety laws on cars which raise the price of the car thousands of dollars, but no real safety rules on motorcylists. It is the law to wear a seatbelt in a car, but a motocyclist doesn't have to wear a helmet. Part of me thinks this is just because we don't want cheap foreign cars competing with expensive brands.
What cheap foreign cars? Chinese cars? Tatas from India? Most foreign cars are more expensive than American cars; American cars are the cheap, crappy ones these days, and have been for a long time. You get a foreign car from Japan or Germany because you want a car that's better engineered, higher quality, will protect you better in a crash, has better fuel economy, will last a lot longer, and has better resale value. Some of these factors have diminished since the 80s (a lot of American cars actually have comparable fuel economy now), but most of this has been the general case for quite a while. How many 20-year old Japanese cars do you still see driving around, compared to 20-year-old Chryslers and Chevys?
The reason we have lots of safety laws for cars is because the vast majority of Americans drive cars (or trucks/SUVs) the vast majority of the time. Very few people drive motorcycles, and many of those only ride on weekends. It's perfectly normal for a government to focus regulation on things that have the greatest impact, or "bang for the buck". Why spend a lot of time and money working on legislation to improve safety for something that very, very few people do, when you can focus your effort on something that hundreds of millions do?
And finally, all decent states DO require helmets.
You have a good point here, but on the other hand, TFS itself said that Blackberry is "struggling". There's lots of companies that sell much less than 1M units a year which aren't "struggling", they make enough profit for the size of their company. It sounds like 1M units a year simply isn't enough for BB to stay profitable. If they're so large they have their own OS team (QNX) and R&D teams, that might not be enough volume for them to stay profitable. Worse, if their marketshare (and absolute unit sales) are trending down instead of up (or at least steady), due to everyone moving to Androids, then that doesn't bode well for them.
Android is only as secure as the phone maker allows. If they keep up with patches and push these out to customers' devices promptly, Android can be quite secure. If they don't bother making any updates after the phone ships (sadly the case with some makers; HTC, I'm looking at you, you fuckers), then of course it's as secure as a sieve. That's the "problem" with Android: it's in the hands of the phone makers, and some do a much better job than others. It's not like the old days with Microsoft, where the OS vendor was the one responsible for this stuff. The vendors have all the source to the OS, and they have total control over what goes into the OS build, and when updates are issued.
So if Blackberry's Android devices are insecure, it's their own fault for doing a shitty job. If they can handle owning and maintaining their own OS (QNX), surely they can devote sufficient resources to staying up-to-date with Android patches.
They have a vastly superior platform. Why toss that out for third-rate garbage?
Well, it's pretty simple really:
Android = profitable (at least for Samsung, they're making a killing)
Blackberry/QNX = unprofitable
It doesn't matter how "superior" your product is if you can't get anyone to buy it and you can't make enough money to keep the company going.
It seems to me they (and you) have made the classic mistake of thinking "superiority" will cause a product line to dominate the market, when in fact it's bang-for-buck which does. It doesn't matter how great your product is; if it costs too much and there's a much-cheaper alternative that seems almost as good, people are going to flock to that. That's exactly what happened with Android. Apple/iOS was there first, but it cost a small fortune (remember how much the first iPhones cost?). Then Android phones came out, they looked much like iPhones but were a lot cheaper (and also didn't have a my-way-or-the-highway bent like Apple devices), so now Androids utterly dominate the market, even if they aren't the most profitable. Then there's BB, which mainly just catered to government and big corporations because of the secure email tie-in, and they've been passed up by cheaper and more functional (in most ways) devices that have the whole app-store advantage.
Um, did you even read the summary? They're not tossing out BBOS, this is in addition to it. Moreover, it's not "me-too", they're supposedly adding BB security to Android, to make this more than just yet-another-Android.
Now of course, I'm rather dubious that their efforts are going to pan out here, but just going by the summary, it's certainly not a case of "let's toss out what makes us unique and become another me-too player in a crowded market".
Finally, their big "advantage" (the BB OS and ecosystem and such) doesn't seem to be much of an "advantage" if they're "struggling". If it was such an advantage, they'd have a strong business, even if it doesn't have the most marketshare. There's lots of companies that have very strong and profitable businesses catering to niche markets (such as government). BB doesn't seem to be one of them. Maybe it's just time for them to throw in the towel.
As for Android being a success, those other companies are still making a profit, are they not? They might not be making Samsung profits, but most of them I presume are making some kind of profit, or else they'd be throwing in the towel too.
Yep, unfortunately, lying does frequently produce better results than telling the truth.
Just look at politicians. How many of them would have been elected if they told the truth?
Our society provides every incentive to lie, and almost no disincentive against it.
Huh? Citation needed.
Usually, if there's some foreign car you can't get here in the US, it's because the manufacturer doesn't want to pay all the money needed to put it through US government crash tests. This usually happens with very expensive, low-volume cars, like the famous Porsche 959 that Bill Gates tried importing and couldn't get licensed to drive on American roads, so it sat in storage for decades. When the carmaker only makes a handful of that kind of car, they're not going to build 5 extra just so they can be crash-tested, unless they really think Americans are going to buy enough of them to make it worthwhile (which for a lot of cars, is a poor bet).
Blind spots are growing as well due to the tiny windows, and so on.
That's why you get a car with blind-spot monitors (radar systems in the back bumper which alert you when someone's in your blind spot).
That doesn't help with the A-pillars though. But you can still get around that by moving your head so you can see around the pillar. When you're turning left, this is something you should be able to do, since the car isn't moving. By contrast, vehicles in your blind spot is a problem when you're moving, usually at highway speeds since the problem is normally lane-changing, something that only happens on multi-lane roads. It's not so easy to shift your body and head around a bit to double-check things when you're moving at 70mph as when you're turning left out of a driveway.
I guess the new requirements for backup cameras sort of cover pedestrian safety to some degree, but I suspect that the need for it has come from the shrinking of car windows to improve the vehicle crash performance.
There's some truth to that, but only some. There's *never* been a car where you could see if there was a small child or dog or whatever right behind your rear bumper, while seated in the driver's seat. That's what these cameras are really for: they have fisheye lenses and let you see absolutely *everything* behind your car. I'd never had one before until I got my current car a few months ago, and it's a god-send. I can parallel park with skill I never had before, because I couldn't see well enough behind my car before to know how much room I had behind me, and having the camera makes it easy. And of course if there's anything behind me as I back up, I can easily see it. I don't even bother looking behind me now (though I do swing my head around to check the sides) as I back up, because the view with the camera is so excellent it's not worth looking in the rearview mirror (plus my rear window is tiny).
In short, we have the technology now so that instead of having a lot of glass (which sucks in collisions and makes your car less crashworthy), we can use cameras and sensors to get even better perception than we ever had with the old designs with larger windows, so why not use it? Even better, it's dirt cheap. Look on Ebay for "rearview camera": there's systems you can buy from China that cost $50 with free shipping from there. Maybe those aren't the greatest quality, but that should give you an idea of just how cheap it is for an automaker, with its huge economies of scale and buying power, to add such a system in at the factory. Considering how much an airbag for instance costs by comparison (even at automaker factory prices, it's a lot more than a rearview camera), and how much a new car costs, there's just no excuse to not have these things on all cars now. It's got to be one of the biggest bang-per-buck deals in auto safety there is. Lots of kids are still run over (usually by their own parents) every year in the US, and don't forget all the fender-benders; rearview cameras can eliminate all those for very little cost.
Actually, you're wrong about cars being lighter. Cars 40 (really more like 45: 40 years ago was just after the OPEC crisis when suddenly Honda Civics became all the rage) years ago were about the same weight as cars now--roughly 3000 pounds. Google it. Cars back then had somewhat heavier body panels and frames, but a lot less other stuff: interior parts, safety equipment, air conditioning, power steering, etc. Cars probably reached a minimum weight in the late 70s and 80s, and have been climbing back up in weight since then, though they've probably gone back down a bit in recent years thanks to higher use of aluminum and high-strength steels.
You're an idiot, and the fact you're been modded "insightful" for what the other responder rightfully calls "Redneck Engineering" is proof that Slashdot is not "news for nerds" any more.
Airbags, brakes, and complex suspension doesn't add a large amount of mass to a car (longer crumple zones and sturdier roll cages do though). Modern, more complex suspensions are actually lighter than the shitty old live-axle suspensions vehicles used to have, and have much lower unsprung mass, but the reason they're used is to improve handling, not to make the car more crashworthy (though this does help avoid crashes). Better brakes do add more unsprung mass but again help avoid crashes.
Americans do spend more time in their cars, and accordingly, you'd think they'd want cars that allow them to survive crashes better. There's no conflict between comfort and crashworthiness; after all, Americans have no problem buying giant, gas-guzzling SUVs which certainly have a mass advantage. The engineering conflict with crashworthiness is with fuel economy, as extra mass works directly against that. However, European cars are obviously safer, even though fuel economy is a much bigger concern in Europe due to higher gas prices as well as higher taxes on vehicles with larger engines. But despite those factors, the Europeans seem to do a much better job engineering cars for crashes than Americans.
Hmm, I must have missed those lines. I thought it was years between these destinations, because why would they bother with hypersleep if it only takes 17 days to get a rescue mission to LV-426?
But yes, 10 months even at lightspeed isn't enough to get to the closest star system (Alpha Centauri) from here, not even halfway.
But now that I think about it, they would need FTL, otherwise why bother sending Colonial Marines to rescue the colonists? By the time they get there at sub-light, they'd be mostly dead from old age.