I don't really see private ownership of autonomous vehicles working out. Maybe for a little while cruise control could take over control of the car, but that would be about the extent that people would use it. Where autonomous vehicles are leading us would be a world where car manufacturers run pick up and drop off services. You request a car, it shows up, it takes you where you tell it to, and then it drives off to pick up somebody else. The need for personal insurance at that point would be some sort of need around how good of a passenger you are. Are you somebody who makes a mess in the car, or not?
Apple's Safari already blocks third party cookies by default, and it is the number one browser on mobile devices. So why is the advertising industry is fighting hard to prevent Mozilla from blocking third party cookies by default while keeping quiet about Apple's Safari browser? Something is wrong here!
Lots of 'normal' users talk about how much they hate viewing websites on their phones and 'need' apps. In a conversation with them they might say "Do you have the app for this website", and I'll say "No, it's a website, I just go to the website". To which they respond with tears in their eyes "But the app is soooo much better. It's more than a website". Most people refuse to visit a website on their phone, they only want to access the internet through apps. So the amount of browsing that occurs in the mobile browser is insignificant compared to either browsing on the desktop, or 'browsing' through an app that has Apple's ad platform tracking the user.
How about this as a business model. I pay the ISP for access to the internet. The ISP's need some sort of justification to attract people to pay for internet connections, so the ISP's start paying websites that generate traffic.
Reviews made sense back when the copy of the software you purchased was the copy you were going to use for at least three years. Now we expect our software to auto update, and perhaps even have a major version change at least yearly.
There's no point in having a review, if the item being reviewed has a high chance of being changed by the time the consumers are going to get their hands on it.
It's not. In reports about how IBM's Watson is going to change medicine something that regularly comes up is how doctor's have learned not to do evidence based medicine, because when they try they get the sued into oblivion. A patient comes in, the doctor uses evidence based medicine to narrow down what's going on. It takes a long time. In the meantime the patient goes to another doctor that throws all possible expensive tests at them, regardless of their statistical probability of finding the issue. The issue is found. The patient sues the evidence based (ie cheapo) doctor, using the shotgun doctor as a witness in a case for mal-practice.
People have no interest in using evidence based medicine when they have their insurance companies money paying for everything.
but I do wonder how private insurance is allowed to exist for essential things like health care.
Because health care wasn't always considered essential. People had problems, died, and that was normal. Insurance started as a way for somebody to pool together some money, and then invest that money to turn a profit. The idea is that if you by yourself saved money for a future health crisis and tried to invest it you might have your health crisis too soon, and you probably can't put forth the required effort to make wise investments with your health savings. But by putting the money into a pool, and letting an 'expert' make the investment decisions, you have a better chance of having the money when you need it.
In Germany, i am told, the prices of services are listed right out front like on some big bill board or something. In the USA, I guess it has been found to be more profitable to keep prices obscured.
It's actually illegal in the US for hospitals to advertise their prices. Congress long ago decided that it didn't want the hospitals competing in a race to the bottom, over prices, and so made it illegal to advertise prices.
but solar/wind will be much cheaper than coal in just a few years.
I think I've been hearing that argument for over two decades now. All of those projections assume a lowering in cost for solar and wind, while costs of coal remain steady, or climb. But it turns out that costs for coal drop too.
I ended up being the only one paying any attention to the game, or anyone or anything else.
Somebody will think "You could have totally taken advantage of that, cheated and won", but playing is so much more rewarding without cheating and winning even more so. Specifically because it's a game, and the point of playing isn't so much to win, as it is to interact with those you're playing with. But what about when it does matter? In what situations is there money to be made by being the only person capable of not being distracted by a constant connectivity device?
In the mean time, I'm not an quadriplegic. So I'll choose to drive my own damn car.
But does driving your own car, instead of having a system which transports you to your desired destination, increase your chance of becoming a quadriplegic?
I can't imagine a future population truly being happy with this either.
Really? You don't think that people would rather be playing games on a mobile device or texting, than having to pay enough attention to their surroundings to avoid harm to others and themselves?
I make sure to include the local Dropbox, Box.net and Skydrive folders in my PC's nightly backups. If you're going to be backing up your computer anyway (as you should be), it's almost no extra effort to include those folders as well.
I haven't backed up my computer since Win 3.1, and have yet to have an instance where I thought "I needed a backup".
Uhh, maybe because people want features that make their lives easier, and people will bank with banks that give them what they want?
True, I'm not arguing with that. It's possible though that when looking at all of the services offered by banks, being able to handle transactions faster may not get many customers. If the cost of implementing a 'fast' system that would have work along side the existing system, is greater than the profit of those customers they get, they won't implement the system. Even if they got new customers, it would result in a negative return on investment. If any bank thought they could do it profitably, they would. But since the professionally studying this must have concluded that it wouldn't be profitable, they haven't done it.
And I wasn't talking about using paper checks instead of electronic transactions, I just mentioned that the existing electronic model is acting as if we were still using paper checks for everything.
Right now you can transfer money instantly. It's called a wire transfer. There's usually a $20-$25 fee for it. The banks don't have much motivation to get rid of that fee.
And could someone please tell me why we can't just do bank-to-bank transfers like they do in Europe?
Because all banks have an interface to the clearing house, and the clearing house was designed to replace guys driving up with trucks full of checks and swapping bags, so the code in the clearing house was designed around the model of every player showing up once a day with a batch of transactions and swapping information. The banks wouldn't make any money by doing faster transfers to their competitors, so why would they change?
Why does the US have such an antiquated banking system?
Because it works and the votes to change it didn't make the majority which was needed to change the system. The Invisible Plumbing Of Our Economy is a really good listen and answers your question pretty thoroughly. In the IK there was a mandate from the government to speed things up. Given all that's happened with the Great Recession it's apparent that the US government doesn't have the power to mandate anything to the banks.
Too many regulations that cause inflexibility and twisted risk/reward feedback for both costs and personal performance
This. I had a friend who worked some government jobs and he said what over shadowed everything was the fear of being the person blamed for when something went wrong. The best way to not be blamed: Do nothing outside of the contract, even for the betterment of the project.
One example that stands out was a simulation that was going to run over multiple computers. The contract said "Must use UDP for all internode communication". They don't know why it said that, but it did. Most likely because somebody somewhere heard that UDP was faster than TCP and they didn't want slow TCP. Needless to say the simulation would hang as packets would get dropped. The solution: build a one off handshake protocol on top of UDP. The result: lots of wasted man hours for something slower than TCP, but still met the contract.
Bill Gates is Microsoft's largest shareholder which gives him considerable power.
Largest share holder, holding a grand total of 4.5% of Microsoft shares. If all other share holders want to change something, they could and over power Gates' shares.
Slashdot Mirror
If all the cars on the road are driverless then the car companies will probably start giving away full liability as part of the purchase.
Would we still want to own cars if they were all autonomous? Why buy the car from the car company when I could rent it for just during my commute?
So can a computer learn them? Would it even know to avoid them on the 2nd pass?
Yes. It might even know about it on the first pass once cars start sharing information about road way conditions.
I don't really see private ownership of autonomous vehicles working out. Maybe for a little while cruise control could take over control of the car, but that would be about the extent that people would use it. Where autonomous vehicles are leading us would be a world where car manufacturers run pick up and drop off services. You request a car, it shows up, it takes you where you tell it to, and then it drives off to pick up somebody else. The need for personal insurance at that point would be some sort of need around how good of a passenger you are. Are you somebody who makes a mess in the car, or not?
Apple's Safari already blocks third party cookies by default, and it is the number one browser on mobile devices. So why is the advertising industry is fighting hard to prevent Mozilla from blocking third party cookies by default while keeping quiet about Apple's Safari browser? Something is wrong here!
Lots of 'normal' users talk about how much they hate viewing websites on their phones and 'need' apps. In a conversation with them they might say "Do you have the app for this website", and I'll say "No, it's a website, I just go to the website". To which they respond with tears in their eyes "But the app is soooo much better. It's more than a website". Most people refuse to visit a website on their phone, they only want to access the internet through apps. So the amount of browsing that occurs in the mobile browser is insignificant compared to either browsing on the desktop, or 'browsing' through an app that has Apple's ad platform tracking the user.
How about this as a business model. I pay the ISP for access to the internet. The ISP's need some sort of justification to attract people to pay for internet connections, so the ISP's start paying websites that generate traffic.
Reviews made sense back when the copy of the software you purchased was the copy you were going to use for at least three years. Now we expect our software to auto update, and perhaps even have a major version change at least yearly. There's no point in having a review, if the item being reviewed has a high chance of being changed by the time the consumers are going to get their hands on it.
They tried the same attack with a male profile and received no hits.
A male wouldn't have helped the organizations diversity quota.
This is "evidence-based medicine", n'est-ce pas?
It's not. In reports about how IBM's Watson is going to change medicine something that regularly comes up is how doctor's have learned not to do evidence based medicine, because when they try they get the sued into oblivion. A patient comes in, the doctor uses evidence based medicine to narrow down what's going on. It takes a long time. In the meantime the patient goes to another doctor that throws all possible expensive tests at them, regardless of their statistical probability of finding the issue. The issue is found. The patient sues the evidence based (ie cheapo) doctor, using the shotgun doctor as a witness in a case for mal-practice.
People have no interest in using evidence based medicine when they have their insurance companies money paying for everything.
but I do wonder how private insurance is allowed to exist for essential things like health care.
Because health care wasn't always considered essential. People had problems, died, and that was normal. Insurance started as a way for somebody to pool together some money, and then invest that money to turn a profit. The idea is that if you by yourself saved money for a future health crisis and tried to invest it you might have your health crisis too soon, and you probably can't put forth the required effort to make wise investments with your health savings. But by putting the money into a pool, and letting an 'expert' make the investment decisions, you have a better chance of having the money when you need it.
In Germany, i am told, the prices of services are listed right out front like on some big bill board or something. In the USA, I guess it has been found to be more profitable to keep prices obscured.
It's actually illegal in the US for hospitals to advertise their prices. Congress long ago decided that it didn't want the hospitals competing in a race to the bottom, over prices, and so made it illegal to advertise prices.
but solar/wind will be much cheaper than coal in just a few years.
I think I've been hearing that argument for over two decades now. All of those projections assume a lowering in cost for solar and wind, while costs of coal remain steady, or climb. But it turns out that costs for coal drop too.
Right... and once everything is designed for consumption, how will anyone actually create anything to be consumed?
The creators will use desktops.
I ended up being the only one paying any attention to the game, or anyone or anything else.
Somebody will think "You could have totally taken advantage of that, cheated and won", but playing is so much more rewarding without cheating and winning even more so. Specifically because it's a game, and the point of playing isn't so much to win, as it is to interact with those you're playing with. But what about when it does matter? In what situations is there money to be made by being the only person capable of not being distracted by a constant connectivity device?
airplanes autopilot still don't cover all stuff and they have less to deal with then a car does.
Which is why getting your pilots license is easier than your drivers license!
In the mean time, I'm not an quadriplegic. So I'll choose to drive my own damn car.
But does driving your own car, instead of having a system which transports you to your desired destination, increase your chance of becoming a quadriplegic?
I can't imagine a future population truly being happy with this either.
Really? You don't think that people would rather be playing games on a mobile device or texting, than having to pay enough attention to their surroundings to avoid harm to others and themselves?
I make sure to include the local Dropbox, Box.net and Skydrive folders in my PC's nightly backups. If you're going to be backing up your computer anyway (as you should be), it's almost no extra effort to include those folders as well.
I haven't backed up my computer since Win 3.1, and have yet to have an instance where I thought "I needed a backup".
- Lack of security (seriously, Dropbox will accept "1111" as a valid password)
Why does one company doing something wrong (in your eyes) count as discounting all possible companies trying to provide similar services?
Uhh, maybe because people want features that make their lives easier, and people will bank with banks that give them what they want?
True, I'm not arguing with that. It's possible though that when looking at all of the services offered by banks, being able to handle transactions faster may not get many customers. If the cost of implementing a 'fast' system that would have work along side the existing system, is greater than the profit of those customers they get, they won't implement the system. Even if they got new customers, it would result in a negative return on investment. If any bank thought they could do it profitably, they would. But since the professionally studying this must have concluded that it wouldn't be profitable, they haven't done it.
And I wasn't talking about using paper checks instead of electronic transactions, I just mentioned that the existing electronic model is acting as if we were still using paper checks for everything.
Right now you can transfer money instantly. It's called a wire transfer. There's usually a $20-$25 fee for it. The banks don't have much motivation to get rid of that fee.
And could someone please tell me why we can't just do bank-to-bank transfers like they do in Europe?
Because all banks have an interface to the clearing house, and the clearing house was designed to replace guys driving up with trucks full of checks and swapping bags, so the code in the clearing house was designed around the model of every player showing up once a day with a batch of transactions and swapping information. The banks wouldn't make any money by doing faster transfers to their competitors, so why would they change?
Why does the US have such an antiquated banking system?
Because it works and the votes to change it didn't make the majority which was needed to change the system. The Invisible Plumbing Of Our Economy is a really good listen and answers your question pretty thoroughly. In the IK there was a mandate from the government to speed things up. Given all that's happened with the Great Recession it's apparent that the US government doesn't have the power to mandate anything to the banks.
Is it a rule now that every law has to be named to imply it does the exact opposite of what it actually does?
The laws would never pass if they didn't.
Then Windows hijacked the "netbook" concept and made them into underpowered Windows PCs instead
You don't think it was the OEM's installing Windows on the machines due to customer demand, is what hijacked the concept?
Too many regulations that cause inflexibility and twisted risk/reward feedback for both costs and personal performance
This. I had a friend who worked some government jobs and he said what over shadowed everything was the fear of being the person blamed for when something went wrong. The best way to not be blamed: Do nothing outside of the contract, even for the betterment of the project.
One example that stands out was a simulation that was going to run over multiple computers. The contract said "Must use UDP for all internode communication". They don't know why it said that, but it did. Most likely because somebody somewhere heard that UDP was faster than TCP and they didn't want slow TCP. Needless to say the simulation would hang as packets would get dropped. The solution: build a one off handshake protocol on top of UDP. The result: lots of wasted man hours for something slower than TCP, but still met the contract.
Bill Gates is Microsoft's largest shareholder which gives him considerable power.
Largest share holder, holding a grand total of 4.5% of Microsoft shares. If all other share holders want to change something, they could and over power Gates' shares.