Well, I wouldn't define away DPRK as completely not socialist. I would call it an unusually perverted form of Socialism. The reason why I call DPRK:s Juche ideology perverted is that it's based on arbitrary rule of the leader and on fantasies about complete and utter self-reliance. Yes, they want everything to be produced domestically, except for the luxury goods for the great leader and his closest friends and family, of course. They have a ridiculous cult of personality. I've also heard that there have been instances where the government forced starving farmers to grow opium poppy instead of grain so that the government could make some money by exporting it. The maxim seems to be that trade and market forces are bad, except when they bring some benefit to the leader and his buddies. None of this is an intrinsic part of the school of thought that's called socialism.
I suppose that if you define Socialism as 'bad policies by leftists' then DPRK becomes the most socialist country in the world, because they have the worst leftist policies right now.
The conflicts among leftist government here in Europe tend to revolve around how much they want to budge to large domestic corporations. Left-wing governments have far too much to do to have time for leftist sectarianism. That mostly happens in the movements on the left that have no chance of getting into parliament. I mean the personal conflicts are probably horrible, I guess (that's why I've never joined a party in my life despite an interest in politics) but the conflicts about the politics itself are relatively mild. For example, the green movement in Europe is essentially debating internally whether or not magic exists (homeopathy and so on), but it's not falling apart because of it.
Well, that sounds a bit like 'the political compass' where you have a left-right axis and a authoritarian-libertarian axis. You have left-wing authoritarians and right-wing authoritarians.
I tend to think about people's political beliefs and attitudes in terms of two personality types: hawks and doves (or a spectrum between hawks and doves), of three ideologies: Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism, and of countless political movements that people (ideally) join in order to try to get things done.
It's easy to bring up the images of the stereotypical hawkish conservative who's involved in furthering religion and the right to bear arms, and of the equally stereotypical dovish liberal-socialist who's a feminist and an environmentalist, but I think most people are a lot more complicated than that and probably a lot more complicated than my amateur model accounts for. I know that research in countries with multi party systems has consistently shown that voters can switch from any party to any other party from one election to another, so it's pretty complicated.
Well, Socialism was created as a sort of cry for help. Is it a legitimate cry for help? The most common counter argument is that there has never been a truly free society and that if there had been such a society, Capitalism would have been all good. The only reason why Capitalism is destructive in our societies is because of our biased and corrupt systems of government.
I personally don't think it's possible to create a government that is above corruption and bias, but I think it is worthwhile to strive towards that as an ideal. I think people who have done it in the past have made things better. I think that history will go on forever and there will never be a point in time when people can lay down and say that everything is fixed forever, but we can improve society temporarily. As for ideology I think it's interesting to think in terms of ideology, I'm mainly interested in Liberalism (in the classical sense) and socialism, but I don't think that any ideology can be the ultimate solution to all of people's problems.
North Korea is Juche which is a perverted form of Communism which in turn is a perverted form of socialism. You could argue that North Korea is a socialist society in the same sense that fascist Spain was a conservative society.
Socialism is the school of thought that's based on the idea that unfettered capitalism will infiltrate and ruin every aspect of society and act over time to concentrate wealth into ever fewer, ever more incompetent hands. This basic belief is shared by everyone from the centrist middle of the road Social democrat all the way over to the hard line Stalinist-Maoist, but the conclusions that people within socialism come to are very different. One reason why most socialists don't call themselves socialists today is because the Soviet Union and its vassal and client states and their horrible crimes against their own populations made it necessary to drop that term.
Socialism can go very, very wrong, obviously, but it's difficult to dismiss the basic premise that capitalism does destructive things.
You'll probably have to wait until everyone has a 10" tablet on their coffee table and a 7" in a bag at which point the 4.5" phone will probably seem superfluous and clunky.
I think the main differences between North Vietnam and China are:
1) The US was not dependent on North Vietnamese factories, but it is dependent on Chinese factories. 2) North Vietnam could do nothing to harm the US directly, but China can reduce the US to ash in less than an hour, unless the US has a secret functioning anti-missile system that could handle hundreds of missiles at once. 3) People in Washington basically fell for the Communist propaganda (Workers of the world, unite!) and believed that a Communist Vietnam would effectively merge with other Communist countries to form a giant enemy, which of course never really happened, because Communism does not really work like that. The current Chinese propaganda is that China is rising peacefully. I don't know if Washington have fallen for it or not, but I doubt they see China as a threat.
The new powerful China is a fact that you're going to have to live with. Once China has become a large empire it will enter into all sorts of wars with weak countries much like the US does today and Great Britain did before the US rose to world dominance, but it will almost certainly never attack the US, Europe or Russia or any other powerful country.
I'm probably being thick, but why can't we just breed lots and lots of spiders and keep them all locked up in a big cage making spider silk? Why do we have to pass them through goats?
tl;dr I love goats and hate spiders
There was a documentary about this, and according to the scientists working on it the problem with farming the spiders is that the spiders need lots of space and if you put two or more in the same cage they kill one another.
There was a documentary (Horizon: Playing God) about it last year that shows the silk being made, but it doesn't explain how it works except that the first step is to separate the spider silk protein from the milk.
And part of the science is that temperature measurements go back to the mid 19th century and actual direct measurement of global average temperature since the 1980s. With such a pausity of observation, one should be very careful about claiming that the science is "well understood". Or at least comfortable with being outrageously wrong.
That uncertainty goes both upwards and downwards in terms of possible mean temperature trajectories and probably mostly upwards because climate scientists are inherently conservative (e.i. not alarmist), partially because they know very little about potential feedback mechanism such as ocean floor methane. We know that runaway warming happened 250 million years ago and killed off virtually everything on the planet, but nobody knows if and how it would play out today and what it would take to start it and what it would take to stop it if it's started.
Born after the 1990's? I'd think that's pretty uncommon around here. I'm old enough to vaguely remember when the ability to literally dial phone numbers, with a dial, was an important skill. Anyway I digress...
I basically agree. If the nuclear industry had come out and said that there would be occasional meltdowns and that every once in a while we would have to evacuate nearby villages for decades and that the idea of a cleanup is typically going to be unfeasible because of the costs and because of corruption, then we might have a different climate for nuclear power where people would be better prepared to accept accidents when they happen. Some countries and states might have decided to ban nuclear power altogether and spend their efforts at improving other power sources. Either way would probably have been better than the middle way that most industrialized societies took.
This is why I think it's important that car manufacturers are clear about the fact that there will be accidents and that some of these accidents will be accidents of the sort that human drivers would rarely cause. When the first human dies in an accident caused by a self-driving cars the company that made the car should be able to say, truthfully, "we're really sorry, but we told you this would happen and you used our cars knowingly".
Where people will soon interact with robots and need to trust them will be robotic cars. My concern is that even after statistically the robot cars have proven themselves to be huge life savers there will always be the one in a million story of the robot driving off the cliff or into the side of a train. People will think, "I'd never do something that stupid." When in fact they would be statistically much more likely to drive themselves off a cliff after they fall asleep at the wheel. So if you are looking for a trust issue the robot car PR people will have to continually remind people how many loved ones are not dead because of how trustworthy the robot car really is.
Isn't that basically what the nuclear industry did? We know how that went.
I think car makers should err on the side of acknowledging people's natural fears when they communicate about the safety factor. People are predictably irrational in that they overestimate new dangers over old, invisible dangers over visible, dangers outside of their control over dangers under their control.
Self-driving car manufacturers could make an effort to make the cars to look as close to other cars as possible to avoid the novelty factor. In order to avoid the loss of control factor you could add a steering wheel and pedals that a "driver" can use, completely optionally, to enable a sort of 'driving on rails' mode that gives them control over the car as long as they don't do anything bad. It might also help if the car had a sort of heads-up display that would display its planned route, planned speed changes, highlight dangers that it has detected and communicate any other safety-related information that it might have.
I'd say down voted because people here haven't a clue about how NASA deals with things concerning the ISS. If you believe they have given any sort of green light on docking then you are greatly mistaken. $20B+ dollars, 10+ years making, and no room for error they will take no chances over a little more than half a ton of cargo. I've been in meetings and seen them pontificate of completely benign things for a week. They take nothing more seriously than the safe being of the ISS. I'm not saying they won't give it a go, but I would be shocked if they have already given SpaceX the go ahead. Not saying they aren't planning, but I will say there are a lot of people who have some decisions to make and they wo't be done lightly.
Yeah, it's actually more like $100-200 billions depending on how you count, or about the cost of ten to twenty Large Hadron Colliders. And there are six people on board who would have to try to make an emergency escape if something went terribly wrong, so I would imagine everyone involved takes it rather seriously, including SpaceX. SpaceX would become pariahs in the space industry if their hardware did major damage to the ISS or if someone died.
I hope to be proven wrong and eat my words;) In my city the main source of pollution are the cars, and the constant gridlock would make overcharging the only problem under my commute more than anything. Still, I think that is better not to lose that 15% of energy unless it is similar to the losses by overhead wiring. I work for a power company, and I worked in many projects in what we where looking for increases of efficiency of 3% or even 1.5% in our power plants. A 20 or even 30% loss for small loads like cell phones or game controllers is meaningless in the big scheme of things, but a 15% loss on hundreds of instances of loads of 150 KW is another thing.
Best regards.
Sure, there is lots of energy to be saved in non-end user settings like factories and whatnot, but when energy efficiency comes into conflict with human convenience or concerns about health or pollution the latter tends to win. Imagine for example how much power Canada could save during the summer months if homes and offices turned off their air conditioning and opened windows and used fans instead. That's probably not going to happen as long as power is relatively cheap.
By the way I haven't done the math on the whole charge cycle, let alone the whole life cycle of the car. Batteries lose charge while the car isn't driven and I guess the bigger the battery the bigger the losses, Right? Wirelessly charged cars would only need a battery big enough to drive to the nearest electrified road. You also have to take the energy needed to produce the battery. I believe the battery accounts for a significant amount of the energy that goes into making an all electric car, so again, a smaller battery would save energy.
This may be a stupid question, but how do we know that North Korea didn't simply drill a hole, say 1000 meters deep, fill it with 7,000 thousand tonnes of chemical explosives and a liberal amount of electric detonators and blow that up to make it look like they have nukes?
I see this more like a pork project for Bombardier from the Canadian government. Considering the huge losses from the wireless chargers and the mass of the bus and passengers, this will be hardly viable on commercial terms, even taking into account the cheap hydroelectric energy in Canada.
Why so? As you note electricity is cheap in Canada and in comparable countries such as Norway, Sweden and Finland. Electricity is still the cheaper option even if you factor in a 20% wireless transfer loss (the long term target is 15% loss). It could also be viable in any city in the world where diesel exhaust from buses is a significant source of pollution.
The next natural step is to have buses and trams charge while on the move. Why? Because the next step after that is to scale down the technology and install it in cars and to install charging strips along highways. In a few decades we can have unlimited range electric vehicles, without ridiculously heavy battery packs. The energy you save by not chugging along half a ton of battery will make up for some of the wireless charging losses and more importantly people will save time by not having to stop at fuel stations.
And yes, I know we're talking two different forms of wireless charging, but there are prototypes out there that can do it. The reason why it's becoming viable now is that there are reasonably powerful $0.10 microcontrollers that one can afford to embed in roads so that the road can aim the charging beam at individual vehicles.
In the low end market it's not the price of the OS that determines which phone is cheaper, it's how lightweight the OS plus apps are. If you can make an OS that runs better than the competition on last year's mid-range hardware you can deliver a fast and modern experience at a lower price. If you could deliver something as compelling as the Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10 experiences (albeit with lower resolution displays) on last year's hardware you could begin to gain market shares in the low end market.
As I said, I doubt that Canonical will get there in time. It's not like Google will stop improving Android and wait for Canonical to catch up. All I'm saying is that there is a large market out there of people who will want to buy a tablet who haven't trained themselves to use Android or iOS yet, so theoretically speaking it's still possible to get a slice of that market.
Speaking of the UI, I can tell from watching their demo videos that they have gone completely overboard with all sorts of spacial navigation, left, right, up, down, swipe in from left, swipe down from top, seemingly all at once... Whew. I'm guessing most of the devs are high IQ people with genius level spacial reasoning skills who find that sort of thing super intuitive.course.
That's true if we think of the market in terms of dollars, everyone who's prepared to pay $499 for a tablet already owns one. If we look at the market in terms of number of users and potential users I think we'll find that more than 95% of everyone in the world does not yet own a tablet. Even if we limit ourselves to the 2.5 billion or so people who have a high enough income that they could potentially invest in a cheap tablet I bet more than 2 billion of them don't yet own one. All those people have yet to be trained to use iOS or Android on a tablet, and most of them probably don't even own a smartphone yet.
Mark Shuttleworth has said that they're primarily targeting consumers in the developing world and corporations/organizations in the developed world, which sounds like a viable plan to me if they can execute it. My doubts revolve around Canonical's ability to deliver a decent version of their OS (both from a consumer perspective and from an app developer perspective) in a timely manner, before the market has been completely saturated by cheap Android tablets and perhaps a cheap version of the iPad. I think it's more likely that it will take them several years to get to where the OS is competitive with Android and by then it will surely be too late.
It's taken off on a bunch of other platforms, why not the browser?
What's the drive behind it?
Games.
What need does it satisfy?
Stuff like shooting cartoon birds at cartoon pigs in three dimensions.
You can't push out something without a market. Flash created a market for 2D web graphics, and now HTML5 standardizes that based on the experience we had in the Flash years. Unity is doing the same thing for 3D, but it will take a while before 3D on the web becomes common enough to need standardization.
Exactly. The driving force is going to be app stores that sell/provide web games and the first really good proprietary solution is perhaps, and I'm guessing here, already under development, perhaps by Facebook or a company that develops games primarily for Facebook.
"we're having difficulties and can't do the purchase right now, we haven't charged (or stored) your CC number. We'll send an E-mail when we're back on line. (You'll only get 1 E-mail from us, and we don't put people on spam lists.)"
I somehow don't think that a technical failure is a smart way to start out your relationship with your customers if you are a tech company, especially not if you are a company that makes software as part or all of your business.
I don't know much about marketing but I know that there are many pitfalls, some of which could be potentially fatal to your business, which means you have to take the major decisions yourself.
Since you're a tech person you have to approach marketing the way you approach technology and perhaps economy, which means you're probably going to have to rely on your techie common sense. Be tentative at at first and investigate the solution space and don't go all in on anything until you feel sure know it's the right way forward for you. (Don't just talk to one marketing expert or two, talk to many and get many second opinions.) Always be iterative, always base your decisions on data and feedback.
If you look even closer you'll notice that about 95% of those apps (assuming we're not talking about games) are crap that the developers should pay you to betatest, about 4% are semi-useful and about 1% are good enough that it would be a challenge for a talented programmer-designer duo to make a better app. You're still probably not going to get rich, because people rarely buy the paid versions of non-gaming apps and non gaming apps (by design if they are any good) tend to be used in bursts of a few seconds which isn't long enough to get the user interested in an in-app add.
Games are a lot more profitable, but the gaming market is sufficiently mature that you need several programmers and designers to get to the top of any established genre, unless you have a super simple and fun idea that nobody has thought of. If you have and idea like that and the skills to pull it off in a timely manner you might have a long shot at actually getting rich off of your hobby project.
Nobody uses it except a fringe crowd of diehard Linux enthusiasts whose expertise is computers, not graphic art.
No, GIMP is used by people who don't want to pirate Photoshop and who can't justify or afford paying for a license. The competition is not between Photoshop and GIMP, it's between Paint.net and GIMP. I prefer GIMP so far, but then again I don't do enough editing to justify a Photoshop license so my experience with GIMP and Paint.net is limited.
I down't think that's fair to say. I think what's fair to say is that both phone/table hardware and software have undergone a tremendous amount of improvement over the last few years and that has caused tension and cracks that Google has been unable to solve and/or paint over as well as Apple has done.
Now that we have phones and table that are essentially good enough for most people's needs and Apple is eyeing the mid-range phone market that Android owns, Google really needs to start filling in those cracks if it wants Android to remain relevant.
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Well, I wouldn't define away DPRK as completely not socialist. I would call it an unusually perverted form of Socialism. The reason why I call DPRK:s Juche ideology perverted is that it's based on arbitrary rule of the leader and on fantasies about complete and utter self-reliance. Yes, they want everything to be produced domestically, except for the luxury goods for the great leader and his closest friends and family, of course. They have a ridiculous cult of personality. I've also heard that there have been instances where the government forced starving farmers to grow opium poppy instead of grain so that the government could make some money by exporting it. The maxim seems to be that trade and market forces are bad, except when they bring some benefit to the leader and his buddies. None of this is an intrinsic part of the school of thought that's called socialism.
I suppose that if you define Socialism as 'bad policies by leftists' then DPRK becomes the most socialist country in the world, because they have the worst leftist policies right now.
The conflicts among leftist government here in Europe tend to revolve around how much they want to budge to large domestic corporations. Left-wing governments have far too much to do to have time for leftist sectarianism. That mostly happens in the movements on the left that have no chance of getting into parliament. I mean the personal conflicts are probably horrible, I guess (that's why I've never joined a party in my life despite an interest in politics) but the conflicts about the politics itself are relatively mild. For example, the green movement in Europe is essentially debating internally whether or not magic exists (homeopathy and so on), but it's not falling apart because of it.
Well, that sounds a bit like 'the political compass' where you have a left-right axis and a authoritarian-libertarian axis. You have left-wing authoritarians and right-wing authoritarians.
I tend to think about people's political beliefs and attitudes in terms of two personality types: hawks and doves (or a spectrum between hawks and doves), of three ideologies: Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism, and of countless political movements that people (ideally) join in order to try to get things done.
It's easy to bring up the images of the stereotypical hawkish conservative who's involved in furthering religion and the right to bear arms, and of the equally stereotypical dovish liberal-socialist who's a feminist and an environmentalist, but I think most people are a lot more complicated than that and probably a lot more complicated than my amateur model accounts for. I know that research in countries with multi party systems has consistently shown that voters can switch from any party to any other party from one election to another, so it's pretty complicated.
Well, Socialism was created as a sort of cry for help. Is it a legitimate cry for help? The most common counter argument is that there has never been a truly free society and that if there had been such a society, Capitalism would have been all good. The only reason why Capitalism is destructive in our societies is because of our biased and corrupt systems of government.
I personally don't think it's possible to create a government that is above corruption and bias, but I think it is worthwhile to strive towards that as an ideal. I think people who have done it in the past have made things better. I think that history will go on forever and there will never be a point in time when people can lay down and say that everything is fixed forever, but we can improve society temporarily. As for ideology I think it's interesting to think in terms of ideology, I'm mainly interested in Liberalism (in the classical sense) and socialism, but I don't think that any ideology can be the ultimate solution to all of people's problems.
North Korea is Juche which is a perverted form of Communism which in turn is a perverted form of socialism. You could argue that North Korea is a socialist society in the same sense that fascist Spain was a conservative society.
Socialism is the school of thought that's based on the idea that unfettered capitalism will infiltrate and ruin every aspect of society and act over time to concentrate wealth into ever fewer, ever more incompetent hands. This basic belief is shared by everyone from the centrist middle of the road Social democrat all the way over to the hard line Stalinist-Maoist, but the conclusions that people within socialism come to are very different. One reason why most socialists don't call themselves socialists today is because the Soviet Union and its vassal and client states and their horrible crimes against their own populations made it necessary to drop that term.
Socialism can go very, very wrong, obviously, but it's difficult to dismiss the basic premise that capitalism does destructive things.
You'll probably have to wait until everyone has a 10" tablet on their coffee table and a 7" in a bag at which point the 4.5" phone will probably seem superfluous and clunky.
I think the main differences between North Vietnam and China are:
1) The US was not dependent on North Vietnamese factories, but it is dependent on Chinese factories.
2) North Vietnam could do nothing to harm the US directly, but China can reduce the US to ash in less than an hour, unless the US has a secret functioning anti-missile system that could handle hundreds of missiles at once.
3) People in Washington basically fell for the Communist propaganda (Workers of the world, unite!) and believed that a Communist Vietnam would effectively merge with other Communist countries to form a giant enemy, which of course never really happened, because Communism does not really work like that. The current Chinese propaganda is that China is rising peacefully. I don't know if Washington have fallen for it or not, but I doubt they see China as a threat.
The new powerful China is a fact that you're going to have to live with. Once China has become a large empire it will enter into all sorts of wars with weak countries much like the US does today and Great Britain did before the US rose to world dominance, but it will almost certainly never attack the US, Europe or Russia or any other powerful country.
I'm probably being thick, but why can't we just breed lots and lots of spiders and keep them all locked up in a big cage making spider silk? Why do we have to pass them through goats?
tl;dr I love goats and hate spiders
There was a documentary about this, and according to the scientists working on it the problem with farming the spiders is that the spiders need lots of space and if you put two or more in the same cage they kill one another.
There was a documentary (Horizon: Playing God) about it last year that shows the silk being made, but it doesn't explain how it works except that the first step is to separate the spider silk protein from the milk.
The science is well understood
And part of the science is that temperature measurements go back to the mid 19th century and actual direct measurement of global average temperature since the 1980s. With such a pausity of observation, one should be very careful about claiming that the science is "well understood". Or at least comfortable with being outrageously wrong.
That uncertainty goes both upwards and downwards in terms of possible mean temperature trajectories and probably mostly upwards because climate scientists are inherently conservative (e.i. not alarmist), partially because they know very little about potential feedback mechanism such as ocean floor methane. We know that runaway warming happened 250 million years ago and killed off virtually everything on the planet, but nobody knows if and how it would play out today and what it would take to start it and what it would take to stop it if it's started.
Born after the 1990's? I'd think that's pretty uncommon around here. I'm old enough to vaguely remember when the ability to literally dial phone numbers, with a dial, was an important skill. Anyway I digress...
I basically agree. If the nuclear industry had come out and said that there would be occasional meltdowns and that every once in a while we would have to evacuate nearby villages for decades and that the idea of a cleanup is typically going to be unfeasible because of the costs and because of corruption, then we might have a different climate for nuclear power where people would be better prepared to accept accidents when they happen. Some countries and states might have decided to ban nuclear power altogether and spend their efforts at improving other power sources. Either way would probably have been better than the middle way that most industrialized societies took.
This is why I think it's important that car manufacturers are clear about the fact that there will be accidents and that some of these accidents will be accidents of the sort that human drivers would rarely cause. When the first human dies in an accident caused by a self-driving cars the company that made the car should be able to say, truthfully, "we're really sorry, but we told you this would happen and you used our cars knowingly".
Where people will soon interact with robots and need to trust them will be robotic cars. My concern is that even after statistically the robot cars have proven themselves to be huge life savers there will always be the one in a million story of the robot driving off the cliff or into the side of a train. People will think, "I'd never do something that stupid." When in fact they would be statistically much more likely to drive themselves off a cliff after they fall asleep at the wheel. So if you are looking for a trust issue the robot car PR people will have to continually remind people how many loved ones are not dead because of how trustworthy the robot car really is.
Isn't that basically what the nuclear industry did? We know how that went.
I think car makers should err on the side of acknowledging people's natural fears when they communicate about the safety factor. People are predictably irrational in that they overestimate new dangers over old, invisible dangers over visible, dangers outside of their control over dangers under their control.
Self-driving car manufacturers could make an effort to make the cars to look as close to other cars as possible to avoid the novelty factor. In order to avoid the loss of control factor you could add a steering wheel and pedals that a "driver" can use, completely optionally, to enable a sort of 'driving on rails' mode that gives them control over the car as long as they don't do anything bad. It might also help if the car had a sort of heads-up display that would display its planned route, planned speed changes, highlight dangers that it has detected and communicate any other safety-related information that it might have.
I'd say down voted because people here haven't a clue about how NASA deals with things concerning the ISS. If you believe they have given any sort of green light on docking then you are greatly mistaken. $20B+ dollars, 10+ years making, and no room for error they will take no chances over a little more than half a ton of cargo. I've been in meetings and seen them pontificate of completely benign things for a week. They take nothing more seriously than the safe being of the ISS. I'm not saying they won't give it a go, but I would be shocked if they have already given SpaceX the go ahead. Not saying they aren't planning, but I will say there are a lot of people who have some decisions to make and they wo't be done lightly.
Yeah, it's actually more like $100-200 billions depending on how you count, or about the cost of ten to twenty Large Hadron Colliders. And there are six people on board who would have to try to make an emergency escape if something went terribly wrong, so I would imagine everyone involved takes it rather seriously, including SpaceX. SpaceX would become pariahs in the space industry if their hardware did major damage to the ISS or if someone died.
That should be 7,000 tonnes, not 7,000,000.
I believe the latest test was estimated at close to 7 kilotons, which should be totally possible to do with chemical explosives.
I hope to be proven wrong and eat my words ;) In my city the main source of pollution are the cars, and the constant gridlock would make overcharging the only problem under my commute more than anything. Still, I think that is better not to lose that 15% of energy unless it is similar to the losses by overhead wiring. I work for a power company, and I worked in many projects in what we where looking for increases of efficiency of 3% or even 1.5% in our power plants. A 20 or even 30% loss for small loads like cell phones or game controllers is meaningless in the big scheme of things, but a 15% loss on hundreds of instances of loads of 150 KW is another thing.
Best regards.
Sure, there is lots of energy to be saved in non-end user settings like factories and whatnot, but when energy efficiency comes into conflict with human convenience or concerns about health or pollution the latter tends to win. Imagine for example how much power Canada could save during the summer months if homes and offices turned off their air conditioning and opened windows and used fans instead. That's probably not going to happen as long as power is relatively cheap.
By the way I haven't done the math on the whole charge cycle, let alone the whole life cycle of the car. Batteries lose charge while the car isn't driven and I guess the bigger the battery the bigger the losses, Right? Wirelessly charged cars would only need a battery big enough to drive to the nearest electrified road. You also have to take the energy needed to produce the battery. I believe the battery accounts for a significant amount of the energy that goes into making an all electric car, so again, a smaller battery would save energy.
This may be a stupid question, but how do we know that North Korea didn't simply drill a hole, say 1000 meters deep, fill it with 7,000 thousand tonnes of chemical explosives and a liberal amount of electric detonators and blow that up to make it look like they have nukes?
Well, I guess there is a a little bit of resemblance.
Now that I think about it he looks like someone sawed Steve's and Linus's heads in halves and attached Linus's top half on top of Steve's bottom half.
I see this more like a pork project for Bombardier from the Canadian government. Considering the huge losses from the wireless chargers and the mass of the bus and passengers, this will be hardly viable on commercial terms, even taking into account the cheap hydroelectric energy in Canada.
Why so? As you note electricity is cheap in Canada and in comparable countries such as Norway, Sweden and Finland. Electricity is still the cheaper option even if you factor in a 20% wireless transfer loss (the long term target is 15% loss). It could also be viable in any city in the world where diesel exhaust from buses is a significant source of pollution.
The next natural step is to have buses and trams charge while on the move. Why? Because the next step after that is to scale down the technology and install it in cars and to install charging strips along highways. In a few decades we can have unlimited range electric vehicles, without ridiculously heavy battery packs. The energy you save by not chugging along half a ton of battery will make up for some of the wireless charging losses and more importantly people will save time by not having to stop at fuel stations.
And yes, I know we're talking two different forms of wireless charging, but there are prototypes out there that can do it. The reason why it's becoming viable now is that there are reasonably powerful $0.10 microcontrollers that one can afford to embed in roads so that the road can aim the charging beam at individual vehicles.
In the low end market it's not the price of the OS that determines which phone is cheaper, it's how lightweight the OS plus apps are. If you can make an OS that runs better than the competition on last year's mid-range hardware you can deliver a fast and modern experience at a lower price. If you could deliver something as compelling as the Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10 experiences (albeit with lower resolution displays) on last year's hardware you could begin to gain market shares in the low end market.
As I said, I doubt that Canonical will get there in time. It's not like Google will stop improving Android and wait for Canonical to catch up. All I'm saying is that there is a large market out there of people who will want to buy a tablet who haven't trained themselves to use Android or iOS yet, so theoretically speaking it's still possible to get a slice of that market.
Speaking of the UI, I can tell from watching their demo videos that they have gone completely overboard with all sorts of spacial navigation, left, right, up, down, swipe in from left, swipe down from top, seemingly all at once... Whew. I'm guessing most of the devs are high IQ people with genius level spacial reasoning skills who find that sort of thing super intuitive.course.
That's true if we think of the market in terms of dollars, everyone who's prepared to pay $499 for a tablet already owns one. If we look at the market in terms of number of users and potential users I think we'll find that more than 95% of everyone in the world does not yet own a tablet. Even if we limit ourselves to the 2.5 billion or so people who have a high enough income that they could potentially invest in a cheap tablet I bet more than 2 billion of them don't yet own one. All those people have yet to be trained to use iOS or Android on a tablet, and most of them probably don't even own a smartphone yet.
Mark Shuttleworth has said that they're primarily targeting consumers in the developing world and corporations/organizations in the developed world, which sounds like a viable plan to me if they can execute it. My doubts revolve around Canonical's ability to deliver a decent version of their OS (both from a consumer perspective and from an app developer perspective) in a timely manner, before the market has been completely saturated by cheap Android tablets and perhaps a cheap version of the iPad. I think it's more likely that it will take them several years to get to where the OS is competitive with Android and by then it will surely be too late.
Why should take off?
It's taken off on a bunch of other platforms, why not the browser?
What's the drive behind it?
Games.
What need does it satisfy?
Stuff like shooting cartoon birds at cartoon pigs in three dimensions.
You can't push out something without a market. Flash created a market for 2D web graphics, and now HTML5 standardizes that based on the experience we had in the Flash years. Unity is doing the same thing for 3D, but it will take a while before 3D on the web becomes common enough to need standardization.
Exactly. The driving force is going to be app stores that sell/provide web games and the first really good proprietary solution is perhaps, and I'm guessing here, already under development, perhaps by Facebook or a company that develops games primarily for Facebook.
"we're having difficulties and can't do the purchase right now, we haven't charged (or stored) your CC number. We'll send an E-mail when we're back on line. (You'll only get 1 E-mail from us, and we don't put people on spam lists.)"
I somehow don't think that a technical failure is a smart way to start out your relationship with your customers if you are a tech company, especially not if you are a company that makes software as part or all of your business.
I don't know much about marketing but I know that there are many pitfalls, some of which could be potentially fatal to your business, which means you have to take the major decisions yourself.
Since you're a tech person you have to approach marketing the way you approach technology and perhaps economy, which means you're probably going to have to rely on your techie common sense. Be tentative at at first and investigate the solution space and don't go all in on anything until you feel sure know it's the right way forward for you. (Don't just talk to one marketing expert or two, talk to many and get many second opinions.) Always be iterative, always base your decisions on data and feedback.
If you look even closer you'll notice that about 95% of those apps (assuming we're not talking about games) are crap that the developers should pay you to betatest, about 4% are semi-useful and about 1% are good enough that it would be a challenge for a talented programmer-designer duo to make a better app. You're still probably not going to get rich, because people rarely buy the paid versions of non-gaming apps and non gaming apps (by design if they are any good) tend to be used in bursts of a few seconds which isn't long enough to get the user interested in an in-app add.
Games are a lot more profitable, but the gaming market is sufficiently mature that you need several programmers and designers to get to the top of any established genre, unless you have a super simple and fun idea that nobody has thought of. If you have and idea like that and the skills to pull it off in a timely manner you might have a long shot at actually getting rich off of your hobby project.
Nobody uses it except a fringe crowd of diehard Linux enthusiasts whose expertise is computers, not graphic art.
No, GIMP is used by people who don't want to pirate Photoshop and who can't justify or afford paying for a license. The competition is not between Photoshop and GIMP, it's between Paint.net and GIMP. I prefer GIMP so far, but then again I don't do enough editing to justify a Photoshop license so my experience with GIMP and Paint.net is limited.
I down't think that's fair to say. I think what's fair to say is that both phone/table hardware and software have undergone a tremendous amount of improvement over the last few years and that has caused tension and cracks that Google has been unable to solve and/or paint over as well as Apple has done.
Now that we have phones and table that are essentially good enough for most people's needs and Apple is eyeing the mid-range phone market that Android owns, Google really needs to start filling in those cracks if it wants Android to remain relevant.