There is lots of crime in cities, but there is also a lot of people in cities, so the amount of crime per person present in the city at any time (many of who sleep in the suburbs/exburbs) is not particularly high. If you factor in that most of the crimes that happen in cities are crimes where the victim is either a criminal themself or a person from the underclass, often a sex worker or a drug addict (or both), cities begin to seem like rather safe places for most people. Just watch out for pickpockets.
Well, I should have said NATO-countries minus France (and maybe Norway), plus other US-aligned countries. This map is probably a pretty good indication of where not to go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CIA_Secret_Prisons.jpg
NATO by the way is primarily a club that promotes military, political and economic cooperation and sharing of resources and preventing infighting between countries within the US sphere of influence. The defense assurances are unlikely to ever come into effect, but they are of course essential in order for the whole thing to work.
Iceland is not a bad place to live, and there is a great deal of freedom there, but Iceland is also a US ally. There is a semi-closed US military air base close to Reykjavik. It would be trivially easy to seize Snowden by force and fly him to the US if the Icelandic government does not cooperate.
I wouldn't go to any NATO or EU country if I were him.
In addition to that Google seems to be moving more and more towards adding new features through Google Plays Services, which gets updated on most phones that run Google Play. I think that is probably how they plan to handle the OS fragmentation in the long run, because that way they could add new API:s on a day to day basis.
The big drawback of that is that developers will need to test for the availability of each new API on each phone at run time and have some sort of fallback mode or a popup that says that the app doesn't work yet on a phone that doesn't yet have a particular API. Also, I would imagine that adding new API:s on a day to day basis to devices with thousands of combinations of hardware, firmware and OS versions will cause 'interesting' unintended consequences and regressions on some devices.
The numbers that I've seen show that iOS and Android users download approximately the same number of apps. The difference is that the average iOS user spends about ten times more money than the Android user. The Play store icon sits right there on the home screen, so I don't think that users are unaware that it exists.
There isn't necessarily a lot of money to be made on Android. If we apply the 80-20 rule to personal disposable income it makes perfect sense that iOS could have close to 80% of the market share in dollars with not much more than 20% of the market share in terms of users, not because iOS users are more technically proficient as you imply, but because they have more money to spend.
That would be nice for dealing with all the different implementations of SQLite and whatnot, but a lot of the really serious problems have to do with quirks at the firmware or hardware level that may be difficult to get to in an emulator.
I believe the free version of Crittercism will let you detect that a specific device keeps crashing your app so you can fix it (or if you can't fix it - blacklist the device in the Play store) before you start getting one-star ratings from users.
I imagine the labor laws are rather lax in the places where they have their offices. I don't think they're committing to hiring a person for N number of months straight off the bat. Those 3000 could be tried out and laid off continuously until they have ~300 good developers that they can spread out across ~50 projects at any one time.
It's not the number of (non-game) apps that matters, it's the quality and coverage. There are 'only' a couple of hundred good non-game apps out there for Android and iOS anyway.
Or look at Amazon doing other things than selling books.
You don't want to put all your eggs in one or two baskets when you're operating in an industry where most everything changes completely in a decade. In fact, it might make sense from a risk perspective to enter into industries with slower rate of innovation and change like automotive, energy, etc.
What will do if and when Google and Facebook et al decide to charge you money for sending email to their users from your domain?
Another problem is that there are already some third party sites and services that won't allow you to sign up with a non-Google/Microsoft/etc email address. Do you have time to complain each time you run into one of those services? I don't, I just sign up with my Gmail address. I should know better, but the path of least resistance is hard to resist.
Yeah, if there was a way to get 100 million+ people to buy and install a box in their home and keep buying new boxes when the old ones break, then that could certainly work.
These boxes would probably have to have some sort of fun-factor in and of themselves, though, because otherwise it would still be like paying for insurance for something that probably won't happen to you. Right now I think these little Android gaming console boxes seem like the most potent shot at getting a box in hundreds of millions of people's homes.
If a service does not charge you money the service will either 1) spy on you and sell your information, 2) bombard you with advertisement or 3) fail (or a combination of the three). When Facebook promises that their service will always be free they're really promising you that they will always either bombard you with ads or spy on you or both. You'll get what you pay for.
Email is failing, albeit slowly. Back in the olden days you used to pay your ISP for email. Now you don't, so you'll get what you pay for. Email is still decentralized and maybe there's a founder effect that keeps it decentralized for now, maybe because the cost of changing it would be too high, but sooner or later email will fade away and be replaced by a small number of walled gardens that are funded by advertisement and/or spying and that communicate with one another by special agreements between the owners of the walled gardens.
If you want ad-free decentralized communication to win, the first thing you need to figure out is how you're going to get people to pay for it. It might be enough for each user to pay a dollar a month, but getting them to do that will not be easy, because the wast majority users will never suffer any adverse effect from the spying, so for them paying for a spy-free social network is basically an insurance plan.
I think that the only way that the decentralized social web and, in the long run, the decentralized web itself could realistically win is if the amount of ads eventually grows so large and annoying and immune to ad-blockers that people become prepared to pay for services just to get rid of the ads.
Of course this could never happen in the land of the free
Well, that's true, it couldn't. Freedom is being able to be wiretapped in whichever app or service you chose...
Privacy, by the way, is the right to keep a lawful secret between you and the government.
I'm not the first one to point this out, but sometimes wonder if one way to read the two most famous dystopian novels is to read Brave New World as a prequel to 1984.
If he's used to working with electronics he'll probably find the basics of OOP quite easy to grasp.
OOP : Electronics Object : Component Class : Production line Public functions/methods : Interconnect Private functions/methods : Internal connections
Even this basic mental model naturally leads to interesting theoretical questions like "can a program generate a class at run time based on information that it has gathered?". (Probably not in any easy or recommended way in C++ or Java AFAIK.)
True, but have you looked at steel prices lately? If the current trend continues we will eventually be unable to afford to build and maintain rail lines because of the price of the rails. Also, the price of copper is high enough that we'll soon start to see drones patrolling electrified rail lines to prevent copper theft, because electrified rail lines have lots of copper wire that's not at high voltage, and thieves have caught on. (Id' imagine electrified roads will have to be patrolled too unless the copper can be fully integrated into the road surface, or if it could be at high voltage at all times.)
Rail is nice for heavy freight or rapid passenger transport, but it sure isn't cheap and it's not getting any cheaper either. Again, look at the price of steel. It's quite disconcerting when you think about how dependent modern society is on cheap steel.
Basically, the problem is that despite all of the progress that's been made in allowing us to look at gender in a sane and reasonable way there is still a small but significant minority of 'that guy'.
I don't even think it's the dongle jokes as much as it is the false sense of superiority that some men have, including men who are old enough and experienced enough and educated enough that they ought to know how much they don't know and that there are other people out there, many of them women, who know more than they about most subjects that are outside of their specialty.
On what might seem to be a completely separate note, I've been wondering for a long time how the US military managed to turn the tide against the insurgency in Iraq. For years it looked like the US was losing or at least not winning the war. And then something happened. My pet hypothesis has been that the US military used automated real-time surveillance and filtering to pinpoint the location of individual high value insurgents and then send soldiers or drones to arrest or kill them until the insurgency basically fizzled out because all the competent insurgents were either dead or smart enough to get out.
This PRISM program was allegedly established and hooked up to Microsoft in 2007, which IIRC is pretty much when the tide turned against the insurgency in Iraq. Coincidence, perhaps.
I'm not necessarily saying that I think that the insurgents used Hotmail and MSN although many of them may have, but they probably used a limited number of Arabic mail and chat services that the NSA could have been hooked up to in much the same way that they're allegedly hooked up to the most common American services today.
I wonder if this is a case of the government turning its proverbial guns on its own citizenry. If you have a really good hammer things have a tendency to begin to look like nails.
The manufacturing business becomes less and less profitable over time as salaries for workers go up and as sales go down in high income market. Look at what happened to laptops for instance. That could happen to phones and tablets too. If you can make a product with your own OS and your own app store and music store and movie store etc, then you can make money even if people aren't buying new phones every 24 months.
Of course, Foxconn is extremely unlikely to succeed in doing this, just like Samsung was (and perhaps still is). But they can try.
Mozilla will purchase some computer devices from OEM supplier Foxconn, load Mozilla OS on them and make them available for resale.
More likely the other way around: Foxconn, the much bigger of the two, will use Firefox OS as a stepping stone to learn how to make their own OS in an attempt to integrate more of the value chain into their company.
I could be wrong, but I remember learning that most silicon cell designs don't require particularly high quantities of scarce elements compared to most thin film cells, or that it is at least perfectly possible to make a decent silicon cell without large quantities of scarce elements. Rare earth metals are reasonably cheap today, so it's not really a problem in the short term. It's also likely that there are enormous finds waiting to be found on the third world and under the ocean floor.
The problem with silicon as far as I understand it is that it takes a lot of complex machinery and a lot of time to make high quality wafers.
A factory can be thought of as a series of tubes (seriously!) with materials going in through tubes at one end and product flowing out through a big tube at the other end. If there is a stage in the production process that takes a lot of time then that means that "tube" has to be really long, which in reality means you need lots of machines working on that stage, which means more cost.
If cold fusion were invented tomorrow everything changes, world politics, anything involving oil or energy production, the environment, space travel, food production, basically everything. So while it attracts cranks by the boatload I would be happy to see huge amounts of funding going to CF. Yet I suspect that if you are a legitimate researcher and you mention cold fusion that there is stunned silence in the room. You might as well bookend it with paranormal research.
First of all it needs to be a form of fusion that's either hot / high pressure enough to allow reasonably efficient conversion to work through a thermodynamic process, or a form of fusion that emits charged particles that can be converted directly to useful electricity. If you can't extract work from the machine then all you have is a glorified heat pump.
Second it needs to go through the whole industrial process from prototype to worldwide mass production to be able to beat more established forms of energy. That is going to take years, if not decades and there would certainly be a fusion bubble or two or three on Wall Street along the way.
The article says that the target application is phones, but that's not true. Journalists tend to think that they're writing for readers with the intellect of six-year olds, and scientists have learned to play along. That's why news articles about advances in energy storage say that they will give us better phones or better cars.
The primary target applications for supercaps are things like regenerative braking in cars (where the power is coming from a generator in the car), all sorts of military applications, grid leveling, etc. By the time that there are cheap supercaps that store enough energy per unit of weight there will be cheaper batteries that store even more. Batteries are also trending towards shorter charge times. Remember when it took 5-8 hours to charge a phone? Now it's more like 1-2 hours, tops.
Looks like whoever edited the Wikipedia page slipped in a zero too much in the Joule number. It should probably say 108 kJ/kg or 30 Wh/kg. But then that is still wrong, because commercially available supercapacitors typically store at most single digit watts per kilogram.
Slashdot Mirror
There is lots of crime in cities, but there is also a lot of people in cities, so the amount of crime per person present in the city at any time (many of who sleep in the suburbs/exburbs) is not particularly high. If you factor in that most of the crimes that happen in cities are crimes where the victim is either a criminal themself or a person from the underclass, often a sex worker or a drug addict (or both), cities begin to seem like rather safe places for most people. Just watch out for pickpockets.
Well, I should have said NATO-countries minus France (and maybe Norway), plus other US-aligned countries. This map is probably a pretty good indication of where not to go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CIA_Secret_Prisons.jpg
NATO by the way is primarily a club that promotes military, political and economic cooperation and sharing of resources and preventing infighting between countries within the US sphere of influence. The defense assurances are unlikely to ever come into effect, but they are of course essential in order for the whole thing to work.
Iceland is not a bad place to live, and there is a great deal of freedom there, but Iceland is also a US ally. There is a semi-closed US military air base close to Reykjavik. It would be trivially easy to seize Snowden by force and fly him to the US if the Icelandic government does not cooperate.
I wouldn't go to any NATO or EU country if I were him.
It's probably a decoy. I highly doubt he's heading for a NATO country.
In addition to that Google seems to be moving more and more towards adding new features through Google Plays Services, which gets updated on most phones that run Google Play. I think that is probably how they plan to handle the OS fragmentation in the long run, because that way they could add new API:s on a day to day basis.
The big drawback of that is that developers will need to test for the availability of each new API on each phone at run time and have some sort of fallback mode or a popup that says that the app doesn't work yet on a phone that doesn't yet have a particular API. Also, I would imagine that adding new API:s on a day to day basis to devices with thousands of combinations of hardware, firmware and OS versions will cause 'interesting' unintended consequences and regressions on some devices.
The numbers that I've seen show that iOS and Android users download approximately the same number of apps. The difference is that the average iOS user spends about ten times more money than the Android user. The Play store icon sits right there on the home screen, so I don't think that users are unaware that it exists.
There isn't necessarily a lot of money to be made on Android. If we apply the 80-20 rule to personal disposable income it makes perfect sense that iOS could have close to 80% of the market share in dollars with not much more than 20% of the market share in terms of users, not because iOS users are more technically proficient as you imply, but because they have more money to spend.
That would be nice for dealing with all the different implementations of SQLite and whatnot, but a lot of the really serious problems have to do with quirks at the firmware or hardware level that may be difficult to get to in an emulator.
I believe the free version of Crittercism will let you detect that a specific device keeps crashing your app so you can fix it (or if you can't fix it - blacklist the device in the Play store) before you start getting one-star ratings from users.
I imagine the labor laws are rather lax in the places where they have their offices. I don't think they're committing to hiring a person for N number of months straight off the bat. Those 3000 could be tried out and laid off continuously until they have ~300 good developers that they can spread out across ~50 projects at any one time.
It's not the number of (non-game) apps that matters, it's the quality and coverage. There are 'only' a couple of hundred good non-game apps out there for Android and iOS anyway.
Or look at Amazon doing other things than selling books.
You don't want to put all your eggs in one or two baskets when you're operating in an industry where most everything changes completely in a decade. In fact, it might make sense from a risk perspective to enter into industries with slower rate of innovation and change like automotive, energy, etc.
What will do if and when Google and Facebook et al decide to charge you money for sending email to their users from your domain?
Another problem is that there are already some third party sites and services that won't allow you to sign up with a non-Google/Microsoft/etc email address. Do you have time to complain each time you run into one of those services? I don't, I just sign up with my Gmail address. I should know better, but the path of least resistance is hard to resist.
Yeah, if there was a way to get 100 million+ people to buy and install a box in their home and keep buying new boxes when the old ones break, then that could certainly work.
These boxes would probably have to have some sort of fun-factor in and of themselves, though, because otherwise it would still be like paying for insurance for something that probably won't happen to you. Right now I think these little Android gaming console boxes seem like the most potent shot at getting a box in hundreds of millions of people's homes.
If a service does not charge you money the service will either 1) spy on you and sell your information, 2) bombard you with advertisement or 3) fail (or a combination of the three). When Facebook promises that their service will always be free they're really promising you that they will always either bombard you with ads or spy on you or both. You'll get what you pay for.
Email is failing, albeit slowly. Back in the olden days you used to pay your ISP for email. Now you don't, so you'll get what you pay for. Email is still decentralized and maybe there's a founder effect that keeps it decentralized for now, maybe because the cost of changing it would be too high, but sooner or later email will fade away and be replaced by a small number of walled gardens that are funded by advertisement and/or spying and that communicate with one another by special agreements between the owners of the walled gardens.
If you want ad-free decentralized communication to win, the first thing you need to figure out is how you're going to get people to pay for it. It might be enough for each user to pay a dollar a month, but getting them to do that will not be easy, because the wast majority users will never suffer any adverse effect from the spying, so for them paying for a spy-free social network is basically an insurance plan.
I think that the only way that the decentralized social web and, in the long run, the decentralized web itself could realistically win is if the amount of ads eventually grows so large and annoying and immune to ad-blockers that people become prepared to pay for services just to get rid of the ads.
Of course this could never happen in the land of the free
Well, that's true, it couldn't. Freedom is being able to be wiretapped in whichever app or service you chose...
Privacy, by the way, is the right to keep a lawful secret between you and the government.
I'm not the first one to point this out, but sometimes wonder if one way to read the two most famous dystopian novels is to read Brave New World as a prequel to 1984.
If he's used to working with electronics he'll probably find the basics of OOP quite easy to grasp.
OOP : Electronics
Object : Component
Class : Production line
Public functions/methods : Interconnect
Private functions/methods : Internal connections
Even this basic mental model naturally leads to interesting theoretical questions like "can a program generate a class at run time based on information that it has gathered?". (Probably not in any easy or recommended way in C++ or Java AFAIK.)
True, but have you looked at steel prices lately? If the current trend continues we will eventually be unable to afford to build and maintain rail lines because of the price of the rails. Also, the price of copper is high enough that we'll soon start to see drones patrolling electrified rail lines to prevent copper theft, because electrified rail lines have lots of copper wire that's not at high voltage, and thieves have caught on. (Id' imagine electrified roads will have to be patrolled too unless the copper can be fully integrated into the road surface, or if it could be at high voltage at all times.)
Rail is nice for heavy freight or rapid passenger transport, but it sure isn't cheap and it's not getting any cheaper either. Again, look at the price of steel. It's quite disconcerting when you think about how dependent modern society is on cheap steel.
Basically, the problem is that despite all of the progress that's been made in allowing us to look at gender in a sane and reasonable way there is still a small but significant minority of 'that guy'.
I don't even think it's the dongle jokes as much as it is the false sense of superiority that some men have, including men who are old enough and experienced enough and educated enough that they ought to know how much they don't know and that there are other people out there, many of them women, who know more than they about most subjects that are outside of their specialty.
Here's a collection of stories: http://mansplained.tumblr.com/, some of these are pretty jarring.
On what might seem to be a completely separate note, I've been wondering for a long time how the US military managed to turn the tide against the insurgency in Iraq. For years it looked like the US was losing or at least not winning the war. And then something happened. My pet hypothesis has been that the US military used automated real-time surveillance and filtering to pinpoint the location of individual high value insurgents and then send soldiers or drones to arrest or kill them until the insurgency basically fizzled out because all the competent insurgents were either dead or smart enough to get out.
This PRISM program was allegedly established and hooked up to Microsoft in 2007, which IIRC is pretty much when the tide turned against the insurgency in Iraq. Coincidence, perhaps.
I'm not necessarily saying that I think that the insurgents used Hotmail and MSN although many of them may have, but they probably used a limited number of Arabic mail and chat services that the NSA could have been hooked up to in much the same way that they're allegedly hooked up to the most common American services today.
I wonder if this is a case of the government turning its proverbial guns on its own citizenry. If you have a really good hammer things have a tendency to begin to look like nails.
The manufacturing business becomes less and less profitable over time as salaries for workers go up and as sales go down in high income market. Look at what happened to laptops for instance. That could happen to phones and tablets too. If you can make a product with your own OS and your own app store and music store and movie store etc, then you can make money even if people aren't buying new phones every 24 months.
Of course, Foxconn is extremely unlikely to succeed in doing this, just like Samsung was (and perhaps still is). But they can try.
Mozilla will purchase some computer devices from OEM supplier Foxconn, load Mozilla OS on them and make them available for resale.
More likely the other way around: Foxconn, the much bigger of the two, will use Firefox OS as a stepping stone to learn how to make their own OS in an attempt to integrate more of the value chain into their company.
I could be wrong, but I remember learning that most silicon cell designs don't require particularly high quantities of scarce elements compared to most thin film cells, or that it is at least perfectly possible to make a decent silicon cell without large quantities of scarce elements. Rare earth metals are reasonably cheap today, so it's not really a problem in the short term. It's also likely that there are enormous finds waiting to be found on the third world and under the ocean floor.
The problem with silicon as far as I understand it is that it takes a lot of complex machinery and a lot of time to make high quality wafers.
A factory can be thought of as a series of tubes (seriously!) with materials going in through tubes at one end and product flowing out through a big tube at the other end. If there is a stage in the production process that takes a lot of time then that means that "tube" has to be really long, which in reality means you need lots of machines working on that stage, which means more cost.
If cold fusion were invented tomorrow everything changes, world politics, anything involving oil or energy production, the environment, space travel, food production, basically everything. So while it attracts cranks by the boatload I would be happy to see huge amounts of funding going to CF. Yet I suspect that if you are a legitimate researcher and you mention cold fusion that there is stunned silence in the room. You might as well bookend it with paranormal research.
First of all it needs to be a form of fusion that's either hot / high pressure enough to allow reasonably efficient conversion to work through a thermodynamic process, or a form of fusion that emits charged particles that can be converted directly to useful electricity. If you can't extract work from the machine then all you have is a glorified heat pump.
Second it needs to go through the whole industrial process from prototype to worldwide mass production to be able to beat more established forms of energy. That is going to take years, if not decades and there would certainly be a fusion bubble or two or three on Wall Street along the way.
I suppose it could be used to blackmail hipster by threatening to reveal their listen history to one another...
So what - anything can be used to trigger malware.
Hush. Don't you know that lots of people need to finish their PhD:s?
The article says that the target application is phones, but that's not true. Journalists tend to think that they're writing for readers with the intellect of six-year olds, and scientists have learned to play along. That's why news articles about advances in energy storage say that they will give us better phones or better cars.
The primary target applications for supercaps are things like regenerative braking in cars (where the power is coming from a generator in the car), all sorts of military applications, grid leveling, etc. By the time that there are cheap supercaps that store enough energy per unit of weight there will be cheaper batteries that store even more. Batteries are also trending towards shorter charge times. Remember when it took 5-8 hours to charge a phone? Now it's more like 1-2 hours, tops.
Looks like whoever edited the Wikipedia page slipped in a zero too much in the Joule number. It should probably say 108 kJ/kg or 30 Wh/kg. But then that is still wrong, because commercially available supercapacitors typically store at most single digit watts per kilogram.