"And, these days, there are more USB charging ports than expresso stands."
USB ports generally give 500mA unless they're specials. My Note4 draws close to 1200mA when everything's going. If you don't use the special high power charge then it will go flat even when plugged in.
At least it has a high power charger. The Nexus7 and GalaxyS2 didn't and would run flat whilst charging if you did anything "odd" with it - like using it in the car as a navigation device for more than a few hours.
"Most people get a new phone long before the battery dies."
Given the short runtime of many of these phones, changing out the battery is a given on long trips - especially when most external chargers simply can't keep up with the runtime drain.
Unibody setups just mean I won't buy it.
As others have pointed out, glass+metal = fragile, which means external cases rule (and cover up the premium bits, so why bother?)
I don't know anyone who hasn't dropped their current phone at least twice, so it's not like dropping the things is a rarity.
The NSA revelations and subsequent photo ops of the "secret installation" of "extra features" in Cisco kit was one of the big reasons my employer decided to spend a 6 figure sum on someone else.
The ironic thing is that the Cisco reps weren't trying to compete on price (more than 3 times as expensive), but pushing FUD about other kit having govt spyware on it - whilst I had the relevant Snowden files open on the desk in front of me.
If the telcos and cablecos weren't allowed to consolidate their monopolies.
For the last 30 years baby bells have been asking for and getting favourable legislation at state/regional level (legislated monopolies and mergers being allowed) in exchange for promises to invest in infrastructure.
In EVERY SINGLE CASE, those promised rollouts have been cancelled long before completion, but state regulators haven't baulked when the telcos have gone back asking for even more concessions (including undoing local-loop unbundling access and driving virtually every CLEC out of operation - there are fewer now than there were in 1981)
The end result is that AT&T is almost completely reassembled without that pesky "universal service" obligation that got imposed in it in 1934 as part of the massive antitrust action which created Title II in the first place.
The benchmark I work with is "how fast the software my staff work with runs"
AMD is generally slower per core, but not much slower - they've generally won on being cheaper and being able to cram more cores in any given box.
FWIW: Over the last 12-13 years memory bus speed has been a _much_ greater influence on real-world processing results than CPU speed. Internal clock multipliers are only of any use if the CPU doesn't have to step outside the box to grab more data/instructions from the ram.
As a rule of thumb for scientific computing we've found that spending more money on bigger/faster ram has paid far greater dividends than putting it into processors.
Chasing speed gains for their own sake is a fools errand - "most" computing applications don't need better performance and that's underscored by the fact that singlethreaded performance hasn't really changed significantly for the last decade - a lot of office systems are now on a 5-7 year replacement cycle because older systems are still more than enough to run their software.
Power savings were (and are) a big gain in the server room - cooling systems are expensive to install and expensive to run. The fact that they fall through to domestic computers is also a good thing - better battery life on portables and lower power costs overall, plus longer life due to less thermal cycling stress.
AMD are doing the right thing in this area. It'd be nice to see them going after Intel's stranglehold on the performance end of the market but the harsh reality is that they don't have the R&D budget to chase both at once.
The going rate for 95R/95W MB/s 64Gb microSDXC devices is between $90 (Sandisk) and $130 (Samsung) depending on the maker.
The fact that these don't have any speed rating on them doesn't inspire much confidence.
Other articles say "class 10", but all devices faster than 10MB/s are class 10 and SDXC requires that as min spec. The UHS ratings would be more relevant.
On the other hand, it's Sony and they're reknowned for gold plating turds.
The downside of potting things is that they get hotter. I've seen one design where potting caused a power transister to get hot enough to melt its solder joints - and as the potting shrank with age it eventually pulled the thing off the board.
The kicker is that the design in question is the electronic controller at the core of the ICE/NAV system of a Nissan Primera and Nissan's solution is to charge $2000 to fix it - by swapping out the module for one with exactly the same design fault.
After word got around what the problem is, some 3rd party outfits started offering to do the repair for about $100 (it's about 90 mins work to disassemble/fix/reassemble) and dealers started offering to charge $500 for repairs - by sending them to the 3rd party outfits.
"High strength steels of the past ten years have brought better gas mileage without compromise"
Cars are _still_ significantly heavier than they were 15-16 years ago. It seems that every time a new method make the vehicle stronger with the same mass, they keep the mass and add strength.
"where with alcohol one metabolizes roughly 1 drink/hour "
There's at least one human gene variant which results in the secondary metabolization rate ( acetaldehyde breakdown) dropping by 90%. Sufferers tend to get extremely red faces after 1 or 2 drinks.
The effects of acetaldehyde buildup are just as bad as the primary alcohol intoxication (probably worse as they add nausea and other problems to the mix)
On top of that any form of liver impairment will slow down processing as will a number of other physiological conditions. The overall "1 drink per hour" meme is an optimistic rule of thumb which has put many people on the wrong side of the law.
These other distracted driving issues are happening because traffic police across the western world are concentrating on the easily measured types of offences such as speeding (paying no attention to heavy fog making the posted speed limit dangerous), etc and are given targets of tickets to give out (revenue gathering) instead of being commended for road safety initiatives and crash rate reductions.
In the absence of "more cops patrolling", the better answer is probably "greater vehicle automation" - to the point where people don't want to drive and are essentially passengers for the most part.
As others have pointed out, spaced out/distracted drivers will do utterly stupid things in the complete absence of intoxicants and other drivers clearly see driving as intoxicant enough (I keep that kind of shit to circuits, where other people's lives aren't at risk.). Even the best drivers make mistakes every day.
Drunk driving itself has dropped away dramatically in most countries. It's no longer seen as socially acceptable and that's been a bigger factor in the reduction than fines or prison sentences. That's allowed distracted driving to get some attention.
It's 0.05% in Australia and has been for 40 years - there's no prohibition there by any stretch of the imagination.
Most of europe is at 0.05 and has been for a long time, etc.
The point is that that level is set to be where the effects _start_ to be seen, not where they're already 5-10 times more likely to cause a crash. Given that a car is a seriously nasty weapon, there are good reasons for not allowing people to drive 'em on public roads if their risk levels are increased.
FWIW: A study 30 years ago concluded that driving with a head cold was at least 4 times worse in terms of reaction times and situational awareness than driving at 0.08
The real issue - the elephant in the room which the net neutrality debate serves to dance around - is lack of effective local competition.
The USA professes free trade, etc, etc but is actually one of the most restrictive countries to do business - and (possibly illegal) state/regional sweetheart deals on local loop mean there is no effective competition for broadband services (A duopoly is as bad as a monopoly and in most areas there is a legislated monopoly on local loop).
With effective competition, net neutrality is a non-issue. There's a reason that this is only popping up in the USA and that's because the vast majority of consumers face a market with either only 1 or 2 broadband providers.
Meantime in Europe, I sit on a 100Mb/20Mb VDSL circuit - unthrottled - getting full bandwidth - and knowing that if my ISP plays stupid games with access to Netflix I can switch to another one with 2 phone calls. They know it too, so they actually provide good customer service instead of the surly service commonly encountered Stateside.
The problem is that poor people buy the things out of desperation, not for entertainment. People are spending food money on the things and that's simply wrong on so many levels.
kinetic energy weapons using nasty stuff like DU often use shaped charges to pierce a hole in the target and then spray the interior with molten metal to take out the squishies inside.
DU has another tactical advantage - it burns furiously. Tanks hit by DU rounds usually result in the crew being incinerated .
Having said that, Uranium is a chemical toxin which is hard to clean up and leaves a heavy metal poisoning legacy for a long time after it's used like this, so there are sound envionrmental reasons for not using it.
Using lasers on missiles or aircraft is easy - all you need to do is heat the skin until it's ruptured and aerodynamic forces will do the rest. Railguns have been promising ever since the Nazis started experimenting with them in 1937, however the fundamental problem of self-destruction hasn't been overcome yet, no matter how the USN wants to put a positive spin on things.
If a warrant canary would provide information about being targetted, then removing it in response to a superinjunction result in a very pissed off judge on your tail.
If you get caught driving without a license in the UK the car will be impounded (bailout fees) and you'll be arrested, charged and kicked out the front door of the station within a few hours unless you have prior convictions.
Court a few weeks later, _if_ the police don't let you off with a caution in the meantime.
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"And, these days, there are more USB charging ports than expresso stands."
USB ports generally give 500mA unless they're specials. My Note4 draws close to 1200mA when everything's going. If you don't use the special high power charge then it will go flat even when plugged in.
At least it has a high power charger. The Nexus7 and GalaxyS2 didn't and would run flat whilst charging if you did anything "odd" with it - like using it in the car as a navigation device for more than a few hours.
"Most people get a new phone long before the battery dies."
Given the short runtime of many of these phones, changing out the battery is a given on long trips - especially when most external chargers simply can't keep up with the runtime drain.
Unibody setups just mean I won't buy it.
As others have pointed out, glass+metal = fragile, which means external cases rule (and cover up the premium bits, so why bother?)
I don't know anyone who hasn't dropped their current phone at least twice, so it's not like dropping the things is a rarity.
"Should do" and "cheapest option" are usually diametrically opposed.
When there's no effective competition to the telco there's no pressure to keep things robust in the face of failure.
The NSA revelations and subsequent photo ops of the "secret installation" of "extra features" in Cisco kit was one of the big reasons my employer decided to spend a 6 figure sum on someone else.
The ironic thing is that the Cisco reps weren't trying to compete on price (more than 3 times as expensive), but pushing FUD about other kit having govt spyware on it - whilst I had the relevant Snowden files open on the desk in front of me.
If the telcos and cablecos weren't allowed to consolidate their monopolies.
For the last 30 years baby bells have been asking for and getting favourable legislation at state/regional level (legislated monopolies and mergers being allowed) in exchange for promises to invest in infrastructure.
In EVERY SINGLE CASE, those promised rollouts have been cancelled long before completion, but state regulators haven't baulked when the telcos have gone back asking for even more concessions (including undoing local-loop unbundling access and driving virtually every CLEC out of operation - there are fewer now than there were in 1981)
The end result is that AT&T is almost completely reassembled without that pesky "universal service" obligation that got imposed in it in 1934 as part of the massive antitrust action which created Title II in the first place.
The benchmark I work with is "how fast the software my staff work with runs"
AMD is generally slower per core, but not much slower - they've generally won on being cheaper and being able to cram more cores in any given box.
FWIW: Over the last 12-13 years memory bus speed has been a _much_ greater influence on real-world processing results than CPU speed. Internal clock multipliers are only of any use if the CPU doesn't have to step outside the box to grab more data/instructions from the ram.
As a rule of thumb for scientific computing we've found that spending more money on bigger/faster ram has paid far greater dividends than putting it into processors.
Chasing speed gains for their own sake is a fools errand - "most" computing applications don't need better performance and that's underscored by the fact that singlethreaded performance hasn't really changed significantly for the last decade - a lot of office systems are now on a 5-7 year replacement cycle because older systems are still more than enough to run their software.
Power savings were (and are) a big gain in the server room - cooling systems are expensive to install and expensive to run. The fact that they fall through to domestic computers is also a good thing - better battery life on portables and lower power costs overall, plus longer life due to less thermal cycling stress.
AMD are doing the right thing in this area. It'd be nice to see them going after Intel's stranglehold on the performance end of the market but the harsh reality is that they don't have the R&D budget to chase both at once.
That depends on their speed.
The going rate for 95R/95W MB/s 64Gb microSDXC devices is between $90 (Sandisk) and $130 (Samsung) depending on the maker.
The fact that these don't have any speed rating on them doesn't inspire much confidence.
Other articles say "class 10", but all devices faster than 10MB/s are class 10 and SDXC requires that as min spec. The UHS ratings would be more relevant.
On the other hand, it's Sony and they're reknowned for gold plating turds.
The downside of potting things is that they get hotter. I've seen one design where potting caused a power transister to get hot enough to melt its solder joints - and as the potting shrank with age it eventually pulled the thing off the board.
The kicker is that the design in question is the electronic controller at the core of the ICE/NAV system of a Nissan Primera and Nissan's solution is to charge $2000 to fix it - by swapping out the module for one with exactly the same design fault.
After word got around what the problem is, some 3rd party outfits started offering to do the repair for about $100 (it's about 90 mins work to disassemble/fix/reassemble) and dealers started offering to charge $500 for repairs - by sending them to the 3rd party outfits.
Sony don't make memory devices - ram or flash.
Even when they had their own form factors, they didn't make the internals.
"High strength steels of the past ten years have brought better gas mileage without compromise"
Cars are _still_ significantly heavier than they were 15-16 years ago. It seems that every time a new method make the vehicle stronger with the same mass, they keep the mass and add strength.
"where with alcohol one metabolizes roughly 1 drink/hour "
There's at least one human gene variant which results in the secondary metabolization rate ( acetaldehyde breakdown) dropping by 90%. Sufferers tend to get extremely red faces after 1 or 2 drinks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The effects of acetaldehyde buildup are just as bad as the primary alcohol intoxication (probably worse as they add nausea and other problems to the mix)
On top of that any form of liver impairment will slow down processing as will a number of other physiological conditions. The overall "1 drink per hour" meme is an optimistic rule of thumb which has put many people on the wrong side of the law.
These other distracted driving issues are happening because traffic police across the western world are concentrating on the easily measured types of offences such as speeding (paying no attention to heavy fog making the posted speed limit dangerous), etc and are given targets of tickets to give out (revenue gathering) instead of being commended for road safety initiatives and crash rate reductions.
In the absence of "more cops patrolling", the better answer is probably "greater vehicle automation" - to the point where people don't want to drive and are essentially passengers for the most part.
As others have pointed out, spaced out/distracted drivers will do utterly stupid things in the complete absence of intoxicants and other drivers clearly see driving as intoxicant enough (I keep that kind of shit to circuits, where other people's lives aren't at risk.). Even the best drivers make mistakes every day.
Drunk driving itself has dropped away dramatically in most countries. It's no longer seen as socially acceptable and that's been a bigger factor in the reduction than fines or prison sentences. That's allowed distracted driving to get some attention.
It's 0.05% in Australia and has been for 40 years - there's no prohibition there by any stretch of the imagination.
Most of europe is at 0.05 and has been for a long time, etc.
The point is that that level is set to be where the effects _start_ to be seen, not where they're already 5-10 times more likely to cause a crash. Given that a car is a seriously nasty weapon, there are good reasons for not allowing people to drive 'em on public roads if their risk levels are increased.
FWIW: A study 30 years ago concluded that driving with a head cold was at least 4 times worse in terms of reaction times and situational awareness than driving at 0.08
"A contract like that is just plain illegal in many states. Maybe even most. I know it's illegal in my state, and also in California. "
It's perfectly normal in the UK.
"In America we have free speech. it is against the constitution for them to censor speech in such a way."
When Valve software becomes the government, then please let us know.
The real issue - the elephant in the room which the net neutrality debate serves to dance around - is lack of effective local competition.
The USA professes free trade, etc, etc but is actually one of the most restrictive countries to do business - and (possibly illegal) state/regional sweetheart deals on local loop mean there is no effective competition for broadband services (A duopoly is as bad as a monopoly and in most areas there is a legislated monopoly on local loop).
With effective competition, net neutrality is a non-issue. There's a reason that this is only popping up in the USA and that's because the vast majority of consumers face a market with either only 1 or 2 broadband providers.
Meantime in Europe, I sit on a 100Mb/20Mb VDSL circuit - unthrottled - getting full bandwidth - and knowing that if my ISP plays stupid games with access to Netflix I can switch to another one with 2 phone calls. They know it too, so they actually provide good customer service instead of the surly service commonly encountered Stateside.
That's fine, IF it's entertainment.
The problem is that poor people buy the things out of desperation, not for entertainment.
People are spending food money on the things and that's simply wrong on so many levels.
It's not water. It's mostly liquid methane.
Those who aren't clear will make damned sure they are for the next one.
kinetic energy weapons using nasty stuff like DU often use shaped charges to pierce a hole in the target and then spray the interior with molten metal to take out the squishies inside.
DU has another tactical advantage - it burns furiously. Tanks hit by DU rounds usually result in the crew being incinerated .
Having said that, Uranium is a chemical toxin which is hard to clean up and leaves a heavy metal poisoning legacy for a long time after it's used like this, so there are sound envionrmental reasons for not using it.
Using lasers on missiles or aircraft is easy - all you need to do is heat the skin until it's ruptured and aerodynamic forces will do the rest. Railguns have been promising ever since the Nazis started experimenting with them in 1937, however the fundamental problem of self-destruction hasn't been overcome yet, no matter how the USN wants to put a positive spin on things.
"they can't 'compel speech' and especially not false speech "
They can and they have, usually as "you will issue this statement or go straight to jail"
Having been in this situation: Yes they can.
If a warrant canary would provide information about being targetted, then removing it in response to a superinjunction result in a very pissed off judge on your tail.
"I think in this case, the sheer scale of the crime would warrant a harsher sentence than your street corner pusher."
Why didn't Regan and the rest of the Contra mob get similar sentences then?
If you get caught driving without a license in the UK the car will be impounded (bailout fees) and you'll be arrested, charged and kicked out the front door of the station within a few hours unless you have prior convictions.
Court a few weeks later, _if_ the police don't let you off with a caution in the meantime.