For example, centralised servers have far more chance of being run by renewables than your home computer.
Good point. Also, there's a good chance those servers are more efficient with respect to per computing cycles per unit of electricity, since they're probably sitting idle less than your average home PC.
"that's great news for the 30,000+ people who die in traffic accidents every year in the U.S."
Great News? Dude, they are DEAD!
Besides, if I were one of them, I wouldn't consider this great news. "Oh, gee, so there's now a technology that could have prevented my death... but I'm still dead." That would just annoy me. (Well, I'm sure being dead is be annoying already, but this would annoy me even more.)
There is no any fundamental problems that make an outlet in condo parking place impossible. It costs very little money to install it, and even add a meter. You don't see outlets because there are very few EVs and homeowners don't care. As soon as ESs become more popular, you will get outlets in condo parking too.
This implies that the condo provides parking - some do, but some require car-owning residents to use street parking. Even in complexes that do provide parking, not all of it is easy or cheap to install charging stations.
I agree that as EVs become more popular, so will charging stations. However, this is something of a chicken and egg issue - someone who rents an apartment may be interested in an EV, but have no way to charge it while at home. He might even try moving, and find it difficult to find an apartment that does offer charging. But if EVs become truly popular, the day may come when a landlord has a much harder time renting an apartment that does not include charging stations, and is thus motivated to upgrade his properties.
I don't mean this because self-driving is cool. Rather, it will make electric vehicles practical in ways they can't be today, particularly in cities.
If you live in suburbia and have a garage, charging your electric car is no problem. If you live in a condo or apartment, you may not have such easy access to electricity. The solution would be to have charging stations available in cities. But then you'd have to walk from the station to your destination to wait for the car to charge. But if the car can drop you off, and then drive itself to the charging station, there's no longer a problem.
Come to think of it, if this sort of system existed, car share / rental programs would instantly become a lot more convenient.
Micro-USB adapters follow a sort of buttered-toast physics for me: no matter which way I try to plug them in, it's the wrong way until I have sufficient light to see what I'm doing. It's a two-hand, lights-on operation every. single. time.
If only someone would create a USB plug that can be plugged in either way. And if only such a plug was included with the new phone being discussed. Oh, wait, both of those things have happened!
Goodness I'll never understand why in english all the first letter in an article title sentence are capitalized. I was reading the title and kept wondering why the heck Horizons new phones were "home" after the Pluto flyby.
Changes in capitalization would not fix your problem. "Phones" can be a noun or verb, whether the P is capital or lower case. The real problem is that titles frequently use ambiguous wording.
As I'm a university student, my school ID counts as a free bus pass.
I've actually considered enrolling in the local university for the bus pass. The amount of money I'd pay for tuition would actually be lower than it'd cost for a similar bus pass to what the university gives away.
Indeed -- if I had to buy some version of Windows today, I'd buy Windows 7. It works, and the UI is pretty reasonable. XP is old and no longer supported. 8 is ugly and I don't want to learn a new UI. I would make the same decision regardless of whether I was planning to upgrade at some future date.
As long as the answer to that is "Fossil Fuels" (and particularly, coal), then we are doing nothing but trading one smoke-plume for another.
One thing electric cars are accomplishing is adding a layer of abstraction to the power. Sure, lots of electricity comes from fossil fuels, but that can change. The same car that can be charged by electricity produced by fossil fuels can also be charged by the solar panel on my roof.
Take out your smartphone and type it there. If you're trying to do something that takes more than a couple clicks on a smartwatch, you're doing it wrong.
Exactly! I was an early adopter of the Pebble. Now people are asking me when I'm getting an Apple Watch. Why should I replace my Pebble when it already does everything I need? It provides me notifications. If I want to do anything more complicated, I'll take my phone out of my pocket.
Comcast offers me $1 less per month if I bundle Internet with basic cable. I never use the basic cable. So I'm counted as a TV subscriber even though I don't need or want it. So I suspect the count of TV subscribers is inflated.
I had a similar deal for quite a while. They changed their pricing scheme last year, so it's finally cheaper to get internet without cable. So I guess that means I just recently cut the cord, even though I haven't actually had a TV plugged into the cable for several years now.
I think tattoos are stupid. That's why I don't have any. I can say this for a lot of things other people like. I don't understand why someone would do it, but as long as nobody does it to me, I'm not bothered by it.
Since when do hipsters care about whether their fashion is actually functional or not? Having a watch that doesn't fully work may be more hipster than one that does.
Umm, that would defeat the whole purpose of using them. Reduced weight of not carrying paper means less fuel, more savings. If you carry the paper as a backup, then why bother as there will be no savings in fuel or paper.
So before the iPad, did they have a single paper copy? Or did they have more than one, for backup purposes? If they had multiple copies, then replacing all except one with an iPad would be a valid way to save weight, but still have a reliable backup.
This is a fail because they could have continued to carry the physical copy of everything needed as a Plan B.
I did not see any information about whether or not the still carry a physical copy as a backup. If it were up to me, I would do just that. And since the physical copy is the backup, not the primary, I would not begin a flight unless I knew that both my primary (iPad) and backup (paper) were both available and working.
If there was any chance that the victim didn't believe that you would return all the data, then they would not pay.
I'm not so sure of that. As a victim, you are aware that you have about 0% chance of getting your data back if you don't pay the ransom (unless you had a good backup setup somewhere). So you pay because you believe your data is important enough to justify the risk. This is similar (though nowhere near the same level) as someone demanding a random because they kidnapped your child. You already are well-aware that they are not trustworthy, but you really don't see an alternative.
Now, I do agree with your other point. If news was out that people paying the random did not get their data back, then I'm sure a smaller percentage of victims would be paying. But some would still pay, because their data is important enough to them that they hold on to that small hope that they might get it back.
The 80's predicted cable would expand to thousands of channels. Hyper specific channels so at any one time you could find the exact programming you desire and keep your eyeballs glued to the screen.
I think all this packaging is exactly why we don't have such channels (on TV). If all channels were ala carte, then there would be motivation to produce the sort of content that each group of people want. Instead, everything is grouped into packages. This prevents individuals from making their preferences known with their wallets, thus the programming we see is the drab sort of thing that appeals to as wide an audience as possible.
Have we solved all human rights issues so we now moved on to grant animals personhood?
While I'm not disagreeing with you, I really dislike this question. Have we solved all problems on Earth that we should start exploring space? Have we solved all problems in America so we should start developing a foreign policy? Have we solved all problems in physics that we can now move on to chemistry?
Simply put, we don't have a clear queue of problems, and probably never will. And even if we did, not all problems can be solved faster by having more people work on them, so it will always make sense to be working on multiple problems at a time.
Hardly proof, but in Asimov's Foundation series, the Encyclopedists were setup on a resource-poor planet. This caused them to develop highly efficient technology, including things like pen-sized nuclear reactors. The point I'm making is, if we were hit with disaster, we will find a way to re-build, but we may end up building things quite differently than before, depending on what resources are available. No matter what, it'll suck for the first few generations, but assuming we survived, it's at least plausible that we could come out better for it in the future.
That's all well and good, but servers tend to have rules requiring mixed case, letters, numbers and special characters. These rules make passwords more challenging to remember. I can remember horsebatterystaple easily enough, but will quickly forget H0r$eBa77ery$7aple
"Marriage" is a word describing a union of a man and a woman, removing them from their parents' households and joining them as the foundation of a new family unit. This word, and the corresponding words in other languages, have been understood this way for thousands of years.
I'm not a part of my parents' household. Does this mean that for me, "marriage" is impossible?
A real marriage is where one woman marries one man.
Sorry if that's difficult for you.
So only certain types of legal marriage (where I live anyway) are "real"? Yes, it is difficult for me to know which state-sanctioned things are real, and which are fake.
Slashdot Mirror
Such as finding humor in New Yorker cartoons.
For example, centralised servers have far more chance of being run by renewables than your home computer.
Good point. Also, there's a good chance those servers are more efficient with respect to per computing cycles per unit of electricity, since they're probably sitting idle less than your average home PC.
"that's great news for the 30,000+ people who die in traffic accidents every year in the U.S."
Great News? Dude, they are DEAD!
Besides, if I were one of them, I wouldn't consider this great news. "Oh, gee, so there's now a technology that could have prevented my death... but I'm still dead." That would just annoy me. (Well, I'm sure being dead is be annoying already, but this would annoy me even more.)
There is no any fundamental problems that make an outlet in condo parking place impossible. It costs very little money to install it, and even add a meter. You don't see outlets because there are very few EVs and homeowners don't care. As soon as ESs become more popular, you will get outlets in condo parking too.
This implies that the condo provides parking - some do, but some require car-owning residents to use street parking. Even in complexes that do provide parking, not all of it is easy or cheap to install charging stations.
I agree that as EVs become more popular, so will charging stations. However, this is something of a chicken and egg issue - someone who rents an apartment may be interested in an EV, but have no way to charge it while at home. He might even try moving, and find it difficult to find an apartment that does offer charging. But if EVs become truly popular, the day may come when a landlord has a much harder time renting an apartment that does not include charging stations, and is thus motivated to upgrade his properties.
I don't mean this because self-driving is cool. Rather, it will make electric vehicles practical in ways they can't be today, particularly in cities.
If you live in suburbia and have a garage, charging your electric car is no problem. If you live in a condo or apartment, you may not have such easy access to electricity. The solution would be to have charging stations available in cities. But then you'd have to walk from the station to your destination to wait for the car to charge. But if the car can drop you off, and then drive itself to the charging station, there's no longer a problem.
Come to think of it, if this sort of system existed, car share / rental programs would instantly become a lot more convenient.
Num Lock and Scroll Lock also provide the same functionality, but the positioning of Caps Lock just makes it convenient.
Caps lock is particularly more convenient on a mac book on account that neither scroll lock nor caps lock exist on current apple keyboards.
Only crap keyboards have a power button.
The article also mentioned the right mouse button. My keyboard doesn't have one of those either.
Micro-USB adapters follow a sort of buttered-toast physics for me: no matter which way I try to plug them in, it's the wrong way until I have sufficient light to see what I'm doing. It's a two-hand, lights-on operation every. single. time.
If only someone would create a USB plug that can be plugged in either way. And if only such a plug was included with the new phone being discussed. Oh, wait, both of those things have happened!
Goodness I'll never understand why in english all the first letter in an article title sentence are capitalized. I was reading the title and kept wondering why the heck Horizons new phones were "home" after the Pluto flyby.
Changes in capitalization would not fix your problem. "Phones" can be a noun or verb, whether the P is capital or lower case. The real problem is that titles frequently use ambiguous wording.
P.S. It is customary to capitalize "English".
As I'm a university student, my school ID counts as a free bus pass.
I've actually considered enrolling in the local university for the bus pass. The amount of money I'd pay for tuition would actually be lower than it'd cost for a similar bus pass to what the university gives away.
Indeed -- if I had to buy some version of Windows today, I'd buy Windows 7. It works, and the UI is pretty reasonable. XP is old and no longer supported. 8 is ugly and I don't want to learn a new UI. I would make the same decision regardless of whether I was planning to upgrade at some future date.
As long as the answer to that is "Fossil Fuels" (and particularly, coal), then we are doing nothing but trading one smoke-plume for another.
One thing electric cars are accomplishing is adding a layer of abstraction to the power. Sure, lots of electricity comes from fossil fuels, but that can change. The same car that can be charged by electricity produced by fossil fuels can also be charged by the solar panel on my roof.
Take out your smartphone and type it there. If you're trying to do something that takes more than a couple clicks on a smartwatch, you're doing it wrong.
Exactly! I was an early adopter of the Pebble. Now people are asking me when I'm getting an Apple Watch. Why should I replace my Pebble when it already does everything I need? It provides me notifications. If I want to do anything more complicated, I'll take my phone out of my pocket.
Comcast offers me $1 less per month if I bundle Internet with basic cable. I never use the basic cable. So I'm counted as a TV subscriber even though I don't need or want it. So I suspect the count of TV subscribers is inflated.
I had a similar deal for quite a while. They changed their pricing scheme last year, so it's finally cheaper to get internet without cable. So I guess that means I just recently cut the cord, even though I haven't actually had a TV plugged into the cable for several years now.
I think tattoos are stupid. That's why I don't have any. I can say this for a lot of things other people like. I don't understand why someone would do it, but as long as nobody does it to me, I'm not bothered by it.
The ultimate hipster struggle is real!
Since when do hipsters care about whether their fashion is actually functional or not? Having a watch that doesn't fully work may be more hipster than one that does.
Umm, that would defeat the whole purpose of using them. Reduced weight of not carrying paper means less fuel, more savings.
If you carry the paper as a backup, then why bother as there will be no savings in fuel or paper.
So before the iPad, did they have a single paper copy? Or did they have more than one, for backup purposes? If they had multiple copies, then replacing all except one with an iPad would be a valid way to save weight, but still have a reliable backup.
This is a fail because they could have continued to carry the physical copy of everything needed as a Plan B.
I did not see any information about whether or not the still carry a physical copy as a backup. If it were up to me, I would do just that. And since the physical copy is the backup, not the primary, I would not begin a flight unless I knew that both my primary (iPad) and backup (paper) were both available and working.
If there was any chance that the victim didn't believe that you would return all the data, then they would not pay.
I'm not so sure of that. As a victim, you are aware that you have about 0% chance of getting your data back if you don't pay the ransom (unless you had a good backup setup somewhere). So you pay because you believe your data is important enough to justify the risk. This is similar (though nowhere near the same level) as someone demanding a random because they kidnapped your child. You already are well-aware that they are not trustworthy, but you really don't see an alternative.
Now, I do agree with your other point. If news was out that people paying the random did not get their data back, then I'm sure a smaller percentage of victims would be paying. But some would still pay, because their data is important enough to them that they hold on to that small hope that they might get it back.
The 80's predicted cable would expand to thousands of channels. Hyper specific channels so at any one time you could find the exact programming you desire and keep your eyeballs glued to the screen.
I think all this packaging is exactly why we don't have such channels (on TV). If all channels were ala carte, then there would be motivation to produce the sort of content that each group of people want. Instead, everything is grouped into packages. This prevents individuals from making their preferences known with their wallets, thus the programming we see is the drab sort of thing that appeals to as wide an audience as possible.
Have we solved all human rights issues so we now moved on to grant animals personhood?
While I'm not disagreeing with you, I really dislike this question. Have we solved all problems on Earth that we should start exploring space? Have we solved all problems in America so we should start developing a foreign policy? Have we solved all problems in physics that we can now move on to chemistry?
Simply put, we don't have a clear queue of problems, and probably never will. And even if we did, not all problems can be solved faster by having more people work on them, so it will always make sense to be working on multiple problems at a time.
Hardly proof, but in Asimov's Foundation series, the Encyclopedists were setup on a resource-poor planet. This caused them to develop highly efficient technology, including things like pen-sized nuclear reactors. The point I'm making is, if we were hit with disaster, we will find a way to re-build, but we may end up building things quite differently than before, depending on what resources are available. No matter what, it'll suck for the first few generations, but assuming we survived, it's at least plausible that we could come out better for it in the future.
That's all well and good, but servers tend to have rules requiring mixed case, letters, numbers and special characters. These rules make passwords more challenging to remember. I can remember horsebatterystaple easily enough, but will quickly forget H0r$eBa77ery$7aple
"Marriage" is a word describing a union of a man and a woman, removing them from their parents' households and joining them as the foundation of a new family unit. This word, and the corresponding words in other languages, have been understood this way for thousands of years.
I'm not a part of my parents' household. Does this mean that for me, "marriage" is impossible?
A real marriage is where one woman marries one man.
Sorry if that's difficult for you.
So only certain types of legal marriage (where I live anyway) are "real"? Yes, it is difficult for me to know which state-sanctioned things are real, and which are fake.