Providing, of course, that the cost of the solutions (of which there are, basically, none) is also presented.
What's the point of going all-out to solve this problem if it'll cripple the economy of the world MORE than not doing anything?
Nobody even has a solution anyway. All we have is a lot of people shouting about who's right, and nobody has sat down and said "Okay, so let's assume this side is right... what the fuck can we do about it?" and then approach the problem from the opposite angle.
Fact is, any "global" problem needs a global-scale solution, of which there are none, and which will cost global-scale amounts of money, which we're not going to spend until we have a viable solution, and may end up costing more than if we DID have, say, a 10m sea rise.
Any power source capable of powering a car to motorway speeds is also capable - upon the damage incurred by hitting things at motorway speeds - of becoming a bomb.
I've seen many more petrol cars on fire on the side of the road over the years. In fact, if you're a motorway cop, you probably see a few every month.
I'm no electric car enthusiast, but the safety thing is something really dubious. I bet when microwave ovens came out that people tried to claim they were "more dangerous" than normal ovens, and a million other examples.
Fact is, you're sitting on X amount of energy contained in volume Y. Once you are talking about powering a car and fitting it into a car, it's a bomb waiting to go off. In fact, if you think about it, a petrol (gasoline)-based car is basically a series of contained explosions where you squirt petrol into the face of an ignition source. One day, something will go wrong, especially if you're hitting things.
I have hit precisely one vehicle, up the back with the front of my car (yeah, totally my fault). It was between two sets of lights, a hundred yards apart, on a roundabout. I'm not a boy racer. The speed of impact must have been less than 20, probably even 15 mph. It caused £9000 of damage to the car in front, and my front was punched in.
My dad is a mechanic. He looked at it. He said that if I'd gone another millimetre or so, I'd have destroyed the engine by the front touching the engine block and then that pushing on things attached to it. If I'd had the later model with air-conditioning, I would have definitely done so because they moved a few things into the gap. Fact is, I was shit lucky not to severe fuel lines, brake lines, radiator, etc. I could have been literally millimeters away from an engine compartment fire. At some *pathetic* speed.
When you have a ton of metal moving at even the slowest speed, it's "easy" (relatively speaking) to have a serious deformation of a cable, tube or bracket that could cause a fire. Couple with a fuel source that has to power said car, and you're talking bombs.
This is why you avoid ALL accidents. Not because "it's just a dent", but because the stresses put onto a car shell in even the smallest of bumps can do damage and weaken internals to the point of causing you much more serious problems.
It has nothing to do with being electric. Hydrogen cars will have the same problem. LPG cars have the same problem. Plasma cars would have the same problem. Too much energy, stored in a shell built to move too fast.
I live in the UK and, while I concur with both your premise and your overall conclusion, I have other problems.
Electric cars, for instance, are just too damn expensive. I priced up an all-electric "motorbike" (really a moped). Sure, the pence per mile is ridiculously low. I drive an AWFUL lot, more than anyone I know (and my dad drives the pub circuit around London making deliveries). And yet I did the maths and still couldn't make it cheaper than a cheap second-hand car and petrol at double the current cost (I've set myself a limit for the last few years of reviewing the cost of my travel if petrol hits £2 a litre, that's when things no longer pan out).
Take into account that I *DO* have a 32A commando-connector feed in a convenient alleyway down the side of my house near enough to my driveway that I could charge a car (my girlfriend has an electric kiln that we run off it). So I wouldn't need to do anything expensive to charge at home, at worst I'd have to buy some kind of adaptor.
The fact is, it's too expensive to buy. They don't appear on the second-hand markets. Those that do have serious issues (such as you having to sign lease agreements for the battery, etc.). The charging takes forever and it would interfere with my use of the car. The range isn't quite as good, generally, as my petrol car with a full tank. I have no care for performance but apparently they beat petrol cars into a cocked hat, so that's about the only plus point. If I run out of charge, I have to faff around looking for somewhere to charge from (yes, they might charge from a 13A socket to get you home, try plugging it in somewhere even if you ask the owner!), and if I breakdown because of that, even the RAC can do NOTHING about it at the moment (eventually I assume they will carry some huge battery packs or something, but even that's a problem).
I just don't see the plus yet. The plus being sold does not interest me. The bike I priced up had a top-speed of 70, which I would say would be perfect for such a device. And it cost something silly like 7p a day in electricity. The fact is I'd spend the money ELSEWHERE, like on higher electricity bills (as you point out), greater purchase price, greater repair price, greater loss on the second-hand market, greater "inconvenience", etc.
These are not unsolvable problems, but they are **unsolved**. And until they are, it's honestly cheaper to buy an old banger with 1 months MOT every month, and throw it away when it runs out (especially with the price of scrap metal at the moment). Sure, you can say that those vehicles wouldn't exist without someone buying them first, but the fact is that until such things filter down into the second-hand market you have NO IDEA how much money you're going to get back on one, or how much most people would be willing to spend on one.
Until I start seeing them at second-hand prices, I have to just assume they are "purchase at top price, then throw them away because they're knackered" purchases.
A benchmark measures the performance of a machine while under that particular benchmark.
Otherwise, it's pretty useless. No benchmark has been able to be used for comparison purposes for more than a few months after release (and things like this are re-released once a year or more). Even back in the days of Dhrystones and Whetstones and all that crap - at best it benchmarks one particular run of code, and that's it. And in terms of general performance, it can do no better than guess.
Fact is, if anyone buys because of a 10% increase in a certain benchmark they are an idiot, unless the code they want to run *IS* that benchmark (to all intents and purposes). This is why the best "benchmarks" are things like how many FPS you get in the game you want to play. Because then you'll know exactly how many FPS you'll get in the game you want to play...
We haven't had highly-determinstic computer systems in our PC's for many, many, many years. Caches, bus speeds, interactions, multi-processors, etc. all throw benchmarks in the bin. And everyone's use case is different. Personally, I'd prefer 8 2GHz cores to any other configuration you could imagine at the moment, other people will have different ideas.
Benchmarks are a waste of time. It's like having stupid logic questions on a job interview. All that gets you is people good at answering those stupid logic questions, not at the job, or at worst someone who *appears* good at answering those logic questions.
Benchmarks on smartphones? It makes even less sense. I'm more shocked that Samsung think that anyone gives a shit.
Again, this isn't AI. At best it'll come out with some kind of image recognition heuristic.
We can't *do* AI, it seems. We don't understand what it should be enough to define it, enough to create things that conform to that definition without - literally - having to be told every single step.
And, again, my biggest bug-bear in all this: After millions of years of evolution, and billions of encounters, and selected portions of that information handed down to the next generation based on its success in a complex world, it then STILL takes years and years and years of hard work to make something that can tell you what colour a toy is in English.
Breeding intelligence in a machine is never given a chance, in terms of time. It matters not that you have seven billion images to try it out on, any sort of learning network WITHOUT such huge foundations to start upon is going to need so much input FOR SO MUCH TIME in order to be able to do what a toddler does. And you'll have to be as patient with the machine as you are with a toddler - switching it off when it doesn't give the results you want for a few months shouldn't be part of the plan (imagine if we wrote off the education of any toddler who couldn't do their colours properly first time every time?).
And we're talking a toddler mouse, or ant, or grasshopper, not a human. Sure, we can get slightly-useful things out of it, but if we want to be serious, we need to invest HUGE amounts of time in a single project, not recreate "AI" every few years from a blank area of memory.
Given the scales of equipment we have at the moment, we are in the range where such things are impractical. In any real sense, we can't even simulate a brain of ant-like proportions properly in any single project, no matter what is claimed in terms of the number of neurons or whatever. It's the billions of interconnections and the sheer amount of data and time it takes to process in order to get anywhere NEAR a useful intelligence that we just can't fake.
I'd be more interested in a project that, starting at literally handfuls of virtual "neurons" spends 20 years of computer time just applying the same algorithm all the time - mix it up with genetic algorithms as is usually the case and you could really get something that has a resemblance of intellect in a certain area. The problem is that it's expensive, long-winded, boring, and possible to end in utter failure but it doesn't make it any less "scientific" an experiment to try rather than just trying to constantly "craft" intelligence all the time.
All we've ever built are highly-specialised, highly-dumb, heuristic machines that can't ever "surprise" us, can only perform in their trained areas, and cannot switch areas of training at all once seeded. It's NOT AI. We're not even really trying to make AI, what we're trying to make are organically-grown statistical tests, and I'm not sure that's what intelligence boils down to at all.
Intelligence comes from experience, and a good start in life, and luck. We don't want to be simulating or relying on luck, I grant you, but we don't give these kinds of experiments anywhere near the start or experience that even the simplest of animals has.
Try pricing in Zimbabwean dollars - you'll see the same problem. Hell, there's a mini-rush on every vendor whenever they mis-price in Euros because the Euro jumped and the dollar didn't, or vice versa.
And every business I've ever run or been a part of has to update its prices every few months anyway. If you work in a fast, competitive market, you are literally changing prices every day (e.g. large grocery chains, electronics suppliers, etc.).
The way you compensate is by "over-pricing" as much as everyone else. Because everyone does it. And you over-price so that, as the value increases, you don't have to re-price everything - you just make more profit at the beginning of that price and less profit at the end. And when you aren't making enough profit, then you ACTUALLY re-price.
The same could be said for any commodity whatsoever.
You could take $150m in gold and sell it on the market and realise that such an action causes a dip in the price of gold you are paid. If anything, this proves that Bitcoin is no different to any other commodity or currency.
On Mount Everest, time slows by 0.00261261 seconds (2.6ms) compared to sea level.
Every foot higher you go is 90 billionths of a second difference, if you want to check the maths for me. The problem is, we're not talking about a sea-level / Mount Everest communication here. The RAM chips are about a foot long at absolute maximum.
And these sorts of effects then suddenly skitter into insignificance compared to solar radiation, different pressures, different air make-ups, heat, etc.
The fact is, we know that this effect exists. We know that time-slowing exists (GPS wouldn't work if we didn't compensate for such things). We know that solar radiation exists. But this single statistic barely bothers to eliminate memory manufacturer, operating voltage, or ambient temperature as a cause rather than these exotic causes.
Chances are, they might just have had a batch of dodgy RAM chips from a single manufacturer more than ANYTHING else combined.
And, even then, you'd need thousands of test sites / machines to even hint at the cause. But, why bother? We know there would be an effect, we also know it wouldn't be this large or obvious and that - chances are - there's a much simpler explanation. The whole "top of the rack fails more often" hints at what complete and utter bullshit this is. That would be an effect we'd notice at sea-level and most likely things like ventilation and heating have orders-of-magnitutide more to do with it.
If you want to do that, electronic booths are much simpler - Italy has them already. Any motorway, you take a ticket when you get on, pay when you get off. You don't need multi-billion pound satellite systems to do it.
And Galileo doesn't "send" signals from the car to the satellites. The car "receives" the current position from the satellites. So there's absolutely NOTHING in this that couldn't be done without Galileo (hell, we have GPS for a start!). And, to be honest, the easiest tax is just to tax petrol and diesel more.
Tracking devices in the car make NO difference here. If you want to tax, you do not need them, and they are actually easily tampered with / jammed and more costly than just deploying an ANPR or toll system anyway.
Speeding fines on all roads? Fuck, to me that's reason enough to let them do it. STOP FUCKING BREAKING THE LAW. If you want to speed, campaign for higher speed limits (a proposal TOTALLY IGNORED by the electorate last time it was brought up in the UK political system), not disregarding the laws we have.
Because we don't trust the Americans, basically. They have a tendency to temporarily switch off GPS in areas of conflict and only share the encrypted military signal with allies that are fighting with them (not neutrals, etc.).
This tends to fuck up shipping in the areas around it, and lots of other problems.
Additionally, the accuracy of Galileo is better. That's a plus point in itself. More satellites in the sky - on whatever system - means more correlation, means better signal in cities and valleys. It doesn't matter what standard, so long as the receiver can decode them and correlate their information. I lose signal every time I go into London, because the high-rises block it. And driving around London's one-way systems when you're not familiar with them? That's the one time you WANT a GPS device to work properly. It's worth it for that alone.
Additionally, the Russians AND the Chinese are doing the same. So Asia and Europe have their own systems. Big deal. Maybe it's because we just don't want to rely on the Americans to hold to their promises. And maybe it's because - for our own military needs - we do not want to be dependent on even an ally. Imagine telling the American people that GPS only works for as long as they stay friends with France. See how much uproar there is, even if they are allies at the moment.
It's leverage over Europe, that we don't need, and that the Americans have exercised in the Middle East. GPS, the commercial / public signal, was switched off and jammed because it might help set up attacks. So entire nations had fucked up GPS because the US thought someone was going to bomb somewhere. That's not a commercially-viable technology to navigate a ship or a plane by. And reason enough to build a replacement that has a bit more "local" control over it, but harms nobody.
"Eventually" I can do what I like. But if I can't run my old apps then it becomes a switch, not an upgade. And I could switch at any point I liked onto whatever else I wanted.
Support the old stuff WHILE showing how cool your new desktop is. And that it can do the old stuff just-as-well (if not better) and that, if you target it specifically, it can do even better.
ext3 would not exist if it hadn't been a viable upgrade / compatibility path from ext2. Same for FAT32. You have to support the old in order to get people to move to the new. Or otherwise, they will hang on for dear life until they are forced to switch, and then probably WON'T switch to your implementation because you forced them to.
Prove to me that I don't have to lose anything. Then you can show me your shiny new stuff.
The fact is, if I can program against the X libraries, and load up that have been programmed against the X libraries, and distribute programs that have been programmed against the X libraries, it needs to all "just work". And it needs to work as good as, or better than, X itself.
When you have that, it pretty much doesn't matter what faddy crap is underneath.
It's like if they replace ext2 with ext3, or ext3 with ext4. I don't care so long as I have tools to read the data, it works as a filesystem, and it has no downsides compared to the previous version. What my filesystem actually *is* is irrelevant so long as it works. What my display manager actually is is irrelevant so long as it works. And in the case of an X-compatible display manager, it has to work like X in all cases without me needing to make changes to my software.
That is, basically, the theory, yes. But if we can get that number down to "2" it proves a centuries-old conjecture that could lead to all sorts of interesting proofs of other things becoming true also.
In terms of computers:
You do realise that we use the difficulty of, in particular, finding large prime numbers as the basis for most modern security protocols implemented on computers? Precisely BECAUSE it's so hard to do?
We're not talking about 2, 3, 5, 7, etc. but we're talking about primes with MILLIONS of digits. Primes so large that even to prove they are prime can take a long time. Primes so enormous that multiplying two of them together makes a number that's almost impossible to factorise back to the correct original primes, so much so that we use it as the basis for things like SSL, TLS, etc.?
And, no, computers can't do mathematical proof. They can help as tools but they are dumb. You do not prove that every number to infinity has a prime within, say, 600 numbers by printing out every number. By definition you'll be there until infinity on even the fastest possible machine in the universe. You could prove that primes up to a number X that would hold true, but X would never be sufficient to prove it was always true. Just the fact that primes only have to be N numbers apart before you hit the next one could lead to mathematics that might well accelerate the discovery and manipulation of primes themselves.
But if you come up with a clever mathematical proof that GUARANTEES the answer, no matter what X is or how many billions of digits it has, without having to worry about ever finding a *particular* prime, then you have something that a mathematician can take as "fact" and incorporate into larger proofs about the universe. Imagine if we just assumed that every prime was like this, and applied it to a large scale engineering project, and then found out that actually - once you get past a few billion atoms - the premise doesn't hold? It'd be catastrophic.
The last "proof by computer" (i.e. by brute-force rather than as a tool) was the four-colour theorem. And even that was just because the problem could be reduced (by a mathematician, and using other proven theories, and logical inference) to a few thousand cases that the computer could iterate. It was used as a time-saver back in the days of manual calculation, not mathematical proof.
Stop relying on metal detectors and X-ray detectors to detect weapons, then.
Because for years there have been ceramic and other weapons that can walk right past them already.
If you want to make sure someone isn't carrying a gun, pat them down. And even that's not a guarantee.
Or maybe you could just outlaw them, and arrest anyone who has them, so you can be 99% sure, when someone approaches you, that they won't have been able to get a gun in the first place. Maybe that ought to be the first line of defence? And then after that, the other checks. And then realising that it's STILL not a guarantee without a full strip-search which is unreasonable and unpractical in all but the most secure areas (e.g. prisons).
They don't need to force a company to upload anything.
They just require the company's co-operation to inform them of the correct process to reproduce what they would normally do, and access to their systems. Pretty much if you get to that point, you already have that.
And, again, uploading an image of a newspaper isn't authentication that the message came from the people who set up the canary. Any agency could say "Okay, we require access to your systems to perform law enforcement tasks that you cannot be party to... now we scan in the newspaper and upload it ourselves... done."
Nobody has to force YOU to lie. They just have to have you demonstrate how THEY could lie using your systems. And that they can legally coerce you to do already. And non-cooperation will see you up in court for failing to comply with a valid court order, so 99% of people will comply.
Same reason the British AA (Automobile Association, not alcoholics) were formed and (later) forced to change their ways.
The whole point of the AA was formed to inform members of police speed traps. Back in the days of red-flags in front of vehicles held by a man. If your were an AA member, and there were no police around, an AA employee would be required to salute you.
If, however, there was a police trap present, they would not. Absence of the salute was seen as just such a canary to warn you despite being a "non-action". Eventually it was ruled illegal and the AA and the RAC both become just "vehicle breakdown" companies
When it comes down to it, if a court / police can argue that they need you NOT to trigger the canary (by inaction or otherwise), they will find a way to make you do it. They already redirect your DNS if they steal your domain, what's to stop them updating the canary themselves apart from a minor technical issue? All it will do is just get your whole domain seized to make you compliant.
ESPECIALLY if the entire point of the canary is to indicate to people whether you are subject to a (potentially LEGAL) court order not to reveal that you're under such an order. Little difference between that and you phoning up your buddy to warn him that you were just busted and the cops have his address - it's seen as deliberate evasion of the law. Even if the message is "I **WON'T** text you at 5pm if I've been raided".
The simple fact, though, is that such warrants are not a problem when they are legal and above-board. The problem is when they are not. Skirting the legal grey area yourself is not the correct response to the agencies skirting the legal grey areas.
If all else fails, they'll just institute a law to stop you doing things like this.
And the answer "The drivers are as supplied on the recovery disk" is not familiar to you?
They are a big OEM. They don't care about supporting these drivers in anything but an OS they have supplied. Like my last 15 years of putting Linux machines into schools, I would bet that any Linux driver is tied to only a particular kernel, and that without proper source, and that they never update it. They won't support other distros and unless you want to run Ubuntu 12.04 (specifically) for ever, you won't see much action above and beyond telling you to put the machine back into it's factory state (i.e with Ubuntu 12.04 and their driver how it's always been installed).
But more likely, it will have some cheap base hardware that's already "supported" by chance and they do nothing special to sell it as a Linux machine. And you won't get anything beyond the standard binaries.
I will happily still to my "chances" on some random hardware, like I've been doing for over a decade. The examples I cite are few and far between and usually because support for a certain type of machine / hardware was DROPPED from Linux distros rather than anything to do with it not actually being present at all.
I think you've just fallen for the advertising - it says Linux so it must mean ALL Linux forever with open-source code, right? My hardware from pre-1999 that says the same will happily prove you wrong. Sure, if you're lucky it had a 2.0/2.2 driver for it at some point, but you don't stand a chance of getting it working nowadays - and some of those drivers refused to install on anything but the "supported" distro.
The fact that this comes with Ubuntu tells you one of two things:
- They support ONLY Ubuntu - or - - Ubuntu does well enough supporting this with no help required.
P.S. I have sent computers back to companies that claimed Linux support, and I made a major UK distributor fight with their suppliers to get me a custom BIOS made for a laptop because they sold it to me as "supporting" Windows XP and then found out it wouldn't boot XP if you had encryption software (required by law in my field) because of a crappy BIOS bug. Literally, I had an AMI BIOS written, just for that laptop, just for me, because of how much money it was going to cost them if I had sent the laptops we'd bought on the basis of XP support back.
Trust me, doing the same for Linux is a LOT harder, especially when they can demonstrate that on ***A*** Linux with ***A*** driver that it works.
Am I the only one thinking that no matter how little I spent on getting a "real" knife, and sharpener, and whetstone, and all the other crap other commenters suggest, and the time spent researching, choosing, and maintaining such equipment, it still wouldn't be worth my time compared to doing it "wrong"?
Sorry, guys, but the food tastes the same no matter how you cut it, and 99% of the time the cut ends up in the blender or oven where it makes absolutely zero difference.
If you were into sailing, or even backwoods skills, or something like scuba diving where the right knife might save your life or save you literally SO MUCH TIME that it will be worth that, then maybe. But to slice a tomato? No.
Tell you what, I'll carry on chopping them with my old blunt kitchen knives and crap technique (honed over years of being clumsy-as-shite and the only way I can cut without chopping my fingers off) and enjoy the damn food, which will taste the same but have cost me less money overall for not buying some Victorinox (enough to make me cringe that you even mention that company's name, a sell-out maker who makes most of its money selling crap swiss-army knives) shite just to cut open an onion.
1) You wouldn't, obviously. 2) People cook for lots of reasons, not all of them are based on your argument. 3) Home cooking can be cheaper than anything you buy pre-cooked elsewhere - or else restaurants wouldn't be able to make a profit selling it. 4) Not everyone is a dolt in the kitchen. Home cooking is rarely a "dozen attempts" kind of thing if you have anywhere near half a brain and have done it a few times before. Those that are dolts need recipes to follow to become "non-dolts". 5) Home cooking can be prepared when you like, how you like, without having to try a dozen restaurants that are open when you want and where the cook is one that you happen to like (how many attempts would that take you, trying all your local restaurants?) - there isn't a "professional chef" in the world that will cook to you exact preferences, or else there's no point being a chef. You get what you're given, and the modifications you can make apply to the removal of certain ingredients and choosing how well done you want it. 6) Cooking, in itself, is a hobby.
More to the point, the argument I would propose, is why do you need to pay someone to tell you approximate proportions of ingredients when the web is full of millions of free recipes (many of them reviewed, and even ripped directly from recipe books without attribution) and you can't really "copyright" a recipe - you can copyright the exact text, the arrangement of them within a book, the photos of the dishes, etc. but there's not much to stop people sharing recipes and their own variations of your recipes.
My girlfriend's "recipe shelf" is full of more scrap cut out from newspapers, handwritten notebooks of recipes from friends/family, and photocopies of single recipes that she happened to like than anything else.
Linux-compatible does not mean anything more than "it works".
And, as far as I've been able to tell over the latest 10 years or so, Linux "works" on basically 99% of machines I've ever touched without having to do anything special (yes, I have jumped through hoops, but that's not the point - here someone else has jumped through those hoops for you).
Whether it works TO ITS FULL CAPACITY is another question entirely. For example, chances are that it's graphics chipset is "supported" but very, very slim that it enjoys full acceleration unless we're talking about an Intel chipset or a binary driver somewhere. And we can already do *that* anywhere we like.
The fuss about Linux drivers is no longer "does it work" (and hasn't been, for a long time) so much as "does it work as fully as possible?". And almost certainly, in a consumer laptop, the answer is no.
All this says is that their laptop happens to work in Linux with a certain configuration. There's no guarantee that it won't include a binary driver and/or only a certain Linux image being "supported" (i.e. working at all). And that leaves you off no better than a Windows machine that only comes with a recovery disk.
(For hoops that I've jumped through, try setting up your Linux partitions to mirror those of a Zip-disk on even boot/install USB disks, having to manually load soundfonts with a script to make soundcards work, or having to compile for some mini-ITX boards that can barely support the 486 instruction set to get an idea of the sorts of things that can crop up with old / embedded / poorly supported hardware).
Quite what's the selling point here? A Linux-based touchscreen (can already get Linux-based tablets that size for much less)? Or a powerful laptop (can get much better laptops that don't cost that much even if you put a touchscreen onto them)?
And people who don't understand their consumer rights and the point of a contract being "fair" in law often cave because they are told by the other party (who has an interest in lying) that there's nothing they can do about it.
Hint: You probably bought on credit card. You report it. If the credit card company pulls that shit, you take them to court.
Sure, it's a hassle, but you're in the right legally to stomp on that kind of shit.
Bundling shite with them, like your sister site Sourceforge does.
Other than that, if it survives a day, it stays on my computer forever. I never worry about disk space, and if I've downloaded something that fulfilled a purpose once, I keep it around in case I need it again.
About the only apps I've "uninstalled" have been ones that lasted literally seconds after I realised that they bundled tons of unnecessary shit in their installers and/or weren't what I was after.
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Providing, of course, that the cost of the solutions (of which there are, basically, none) is also presented.
What's the point of going all-out to solve this problem if it'll cripple the economy of the world MORE than not doing anything?
Nobody even has a solution anyway. All we have is a lot of people shouting about who's right, and nobody has sat down and said "Okay, so let's assume this side is right... what the fuck can we do about it?" and then approach the problem from the opposite angle.
Fact is, any "global" problem needs a global-scale solution, of which there are none, and which will cost global-scale amounts of money, which we're not going to spend until we have a viable solution, and may end up costing more than if we DID have, say, a 10m sea rise.
Any power source capable of powering a car to motorway speeds is also capable - upon the damage incurred by hitting things at motorway speeds - of becoming a bomb.
I've seen many more petrol cars on fire on the side of the road over the years. In fact, if you're a motorway cop, you probably see a few every month.
I'm no electric car enthusiast, but the safety thing is something really dubious. I bet when microwave ovens came out that people tried to claim they were "more dangerous" than normal ovens, and a million other examples.
Fact is, you're sitting on X amount of energy contained in volume Y. Once you are talking about powering a car and fitting it into a car, it's a bomb waiting to go off. In fact, if you think about it, a petrol (gasoline)-based car is basically a series of contained explosions where you squirt petrol into the face of an ignition source. One day, something will go wrong, especially if you're hitting things.
I have hit precisely one vehicle, up the back with the front of my car (yeah, totally my fault). It was between two sets of lights, a hundred yards apart, on a roundabout. I'm not a boy racer. The speed of impact must have been less than 20, probably even 15 mph. It caused £9000 of damage to the car in front, and my front was punched in.
My dad is a mechanic. He looked at it. He said that if I'd gone another millimetre or so, I'd have destroyed the engine by the front touching the engine block and then that pushing on things attached to it. If I'd had the later model with air-conditioning, I would have definitely done so because they moved a few things into the gap. Fact is, I was shit lucky not to severe fuel lines, brake lines, radiator, etc. I could have been literally millimeters away from an engine compartment fire. At some *pathetic* speed.
When you have a ton of metal moving at even the slowest speed, it's "easy" (relatively speaking) to have a serious deformation of a cable, tube or bracket that could cause a fire. Couple with a fuel source that has to power said car, and you're talking bombs.
This is why you avoid ALL accidents. Not because "it's just a dent", but because the stresses put onto a car shell in even the smallest of bumps can do damage and weaken internals to the point of causing you much more serious problems.
It has nothing to do with being electric. Hydrogen cars will have the same problem. LPG cars have the same problem. Plasma cars would have the same problem. Too much energy, stored in a shell built to move too fast.
I live in the UK and, while I concur with both your premise and your overall conclusion, I have other problems.
Electric cars, for instance, are just too damn expensive. I priced up an all-electric "motorbike" (really a moped). Sure, the pence per mile is ridiculously low. I drive an AWFUL lot, more than anyone I know (and my dad drives the pub circuit around London making deliveries). And yet I did the maths and still couldn't make it cheaper than a cheap second-hand car and petrol at double the current cost (I've set myself a limit for the last few years of reviewing the cost of my travel if petrol hits £2 a litre, that's when things no longer pan out).
Take into account that I *DO* have a 32A commando-connector feed in a convenient alleyway down the side of my house near enough to my driveway that I could charge a car (my girlfriend has an electric kiln that we run off it). So I wouldn't need to do anything expensive to charge at home, at worst I'd have to buy some kind of adaptor.
The fact is, it's too expensive to buy. They don't appear on the second-hand markets. Those that do have serious issues (such as you having to sign lease agreements for the battery, etc.). The charging takes forever and it would interfere with my use of the car. The range isn't quite as good, generally, as my petrol car with a full tank. I have no care for performance but apparently they beat petrol cars into a cocked hat, so that's about the only plus point. If I run out of charge, I have to faff around looking for somewhere to charge from (yes, they might charge from a 13A socket to get you home, try plugging it in somewhere even if you ask the owner!), and if I breakdown because of that, even the RAC can do NOTHING about it at the moment (eventually I assume they will carry some huge battery packs or something, but even that's a problem).
I just don't see the plus yet. The plus being sold does not interest me. The bike I priced up had a top-speed of 70, which I would say would be perfect for such a device. And it cost something silly like 7p a day in electricity. The fact is I'd spend the money ELSEWHERE, like on higher electricity bills (as you point out), greater purchase price, greater repair price, greater loss on the second-hand market, greater "inconvenience", etc.
These are not unsolvable problems, but they are **unsolved**. And until they are, it's honestly cheaper to buy an old banger with 1 months MOT every month, and throw it away when it runs out (especially with the price of scrap metal at the moment). Sure, you can say that those vehicles wouldn't exist without someone buying them first, but the fact is that until such things filter down into the second-hand market you have NO IDEA how much money you're going to get back on one, or how much most people would be willing to spend on one.
Until I start seeing them at second-hand prices, I have to just assume they are "purchase at top price, then throw them away because they're knackered" purchases.
A benchmark measures the performance of a machine while under that particular benchmark.
Otherwise, it's pretty useless. No benchmark has been able to be used for comparison purposes for more than a few months after release (and things like this are re-released once a year or more). Even back in the days of Dhrystones and Whetstones and all that crap - at best it benchmarks one particular run of code, and that's it. And in terms of general performance, it can do no better than guess.
Fact is, if anyone buys because of a 10% increase in a certain benchmark they are an idiot, unless the code they want to run *IS* that benchmark (to all intents and purposes). This is why the best "benchmarks" are things like how many FPS you get in the game you want to play. Because then you'll know exactly how many FPS you'll get in the game you want to play...
We haven't had highly-determinstic computer systems in our PC's for many, many, many years. Caches, bus speeds, interactions, multi-processors, etc. all throw benchmarks in the bin. And everyone's use case is different. Personally, I'd prefer 8 2GHz cores to any other configuration you could imagine at the moment, other people will have different ideas.
Benchmarks are a waste of time. It's like having stupid logic questions on a job interview. All that gets you is people good at answering those stupid logic questions, not at the job, or at worst someone who *appears* good at answering those logic questions.
Benchmarks on smartphones? It makes even less sense. I'm more shocked that Samsung think that anyone gives a shit.
Sigh.
Again, this isn't AI. At best it'll come out with some kind of image recognition heuristic.
We can't *do* AI, it seems. We don't understand what it should be enough to define it, enough to create things that conform to that definition without - literally - having to be told every single step.
And, again, my biggest bug-bear in all this: After millions of years of evolution, and billions of encounters, and selected portions of that information handed down to the next generation based on its success in a complex world, it then STILL takes years and years and years of hard work to make something that can tell you what colour a toy is in English.
Breeding intelligence in a machine is never given a chance, in terms of time. It matters not that you have seven billion images to try it out on, any sort of learning network WITHOUT such huge foundations to start upon is going to need so much input FOR SO MUCH TIME in order to be able to do what a toddler does. And you'll have to be as patient with the machine as you are with a toddler - switching it off when it doesn't give the results you want for a few months shouldn't be part of the plan (imagine if we wrote off the education of any toddler who couldn't do their colours properly first time every time?).
And we're talking a toddler mouse, or ant, or grasshopper, not a human. Sure, we can get slightly-useful things out of it, but if we want to be serious, we need to invest HUGE amounts of time in a single project, not recreate "AI" every few years from a blank area of memory.
Given the scales of equipment we have at the moment, we are in the range where such things are impractical. In any real sense, we can't even simulate a brain of ant-like proportions properly in any single project, no matter what is claimed in terms of the number of neurons or whatever. It's the billions of interconnections and the sheer amount of data and time it takes to process in order to get anywhere NEAR a useful intelligence that we just can't fake.
I'd be more interested in a project that, starting at literally handfuls of virtual "neurons" spends 20 years of computer time just applying the same algorithm all the time - mix it up with genetic algorithms as is usually the case and you could really get something that has a resemblance of intellect in a certain area. The problem is that it's expensive, long-winded, boring, and possible to end in utter failure but it doesn't make it any less "scientific" an experiment to try rather than just trying to constantly "craft" intelligence all the time.
All we've ever built are highly-specialised, highly-dumb, heuristic machines that can't ever "surprise" us, can only perform in their trained areas, and cannot switch areas of training at all once seeded. It's NOT AI. We're not even really trying to make AI, what we're trying to make are organically-grown statistical tests, and I'm not sure that's what intelligence boils down to at all.
Intelligence comes from experience, and a good start in life, and luck. We don't want to be simulating or relying on luck, I grant you, but we don't give these kinds of experiments anywhere near the start or experience that even the simplest of animals has.
Try pricing in Zimbabwean dollars - you'll see the same problem. Hell, there's a mini-rush on every vendor whenever they mis-price in Euros because the Euro jumped and the dollar didn't, or vice versa.
And every business I've ever run or been a part of has to update its prices every few months anyway. If you work in a fast, competitive market, you are literally changing prices every day (e.g. large grocery chains, electronics suppliers, etc.).
The way you compensate is by "over-pricing" as much as everyone else. Because everyone does it. And you over-price so that, as the value increases, you don't have to re-price everything - you just make more profit at the beginning of that price and less profit at the end. And when you aren't making enough profit, then you ACTUALLY re-price.
The same could be said for any commodity whatsoever.
You could take $150m in gold and sell it on the market and realise that such an action causes a dip in the price of gold you are paid. If anything, this proves that Bitcoin is no different to any other commodity or currency.
On Mount Everest, time slows by 0.00261261 seconds (2.6ms) compared to sea level.
Every foot higher you go is 90 billionths of a second difference, if you want to check the maths for me. The problem is, we're not talking about a sea-level / Mount Everest communication here. The RAM chips are about a foot long at absolute maximum.
And these sorts of effects then suddenly skitter into insignificance compared to solar radiation, different pressures, different air make-ups, heat, etc.
The fact is, we know that this effect exists. We know that time-slowing exists (GPS wouldn't work if we didn't compensate for such things). We know that solar radiation exists. But this single statistic barely bothers to eliminate memory manufacturer, operating voltage, or ambient temperature as a cause rather than these exotic causes.
Chances are, they might just have had a batch of dodgy RAM chips from a single manufacturer more than ANYTHING else combined.
And, even then, you'd need thousands of test sites / machines to even hint at the cause. But, why bother? We know there would be an effect, we also know it wouldn't be this large or obvious and that - chances are - there's a much simpler explanation. The whole "top of the rack fails more often" hints at what complete and utter bullshit this is. That would be an effect we'd notice at sea-level and most likely things like ventilation and heating have orders-of-magnitutide more to do with it.
Don't think "Amazon parcels".
Think "rescue missions". Think "aid".
This is a stupidly expensive way to do road tax.
If you want to do that, electronic booths are much simpler - Italy has them already. Any motorway, you take a ticket when you get on, pay when you get off. You don't need multi-billion pound satellite systems to do it.
And Galileo doesn't "send" signals from the car to the satellites. The car "receives" the current position from the satellites. So there's absolutely NOTHING in this that couldn't be done without Galileo (hell, we have GPS for a start!). And, to be honest, the easiest tax is just to tax petrol and diesel more.
Tracking devices in the car make NO difference here. If you want to tax, you do not need them, and they are actually easily tampered with / jammed and more costly than just deploying an ANPR or toll system anyway.
Speeding fines on all roads? Fuck, to me that's reason enough to let them do it. STOP FUCKING BREAKING THE LAW. If you want to speed, campaign for higher speed limits (a proposal TOTALLY IGNORED by the electorate last time it was brought up in the UK political system), not disregarding the laws we have.
Because we don't trust the Americans, basically. They have a tendency to temporarily switch off GPS in areas of conflict and only share the encrypted military signal with allies that are fighting with them (not neutrals, etc.).
This tends to fuck up shipping in the areas around it, and lots of other problems.
Additionally, the accuracy of Galileo is better. That's a plus point in itself. More satellites in the sky - on whatever system - means more correlation, means better signal in cities and valleys. It doesn't matter what standard, so long as the receiver can decode them and correlate their information. I lose signal every time I go into London, because the high-rises block it. And driving around London's one-way systems when you're not familiar with them? That's the one time you WANT a GPS device to work properly. It's worth it for that alone.
Additionally, the Russians AND the Chinese are doing the same. So Asia and Europe have their own systems. Big deal. Maybe it's because we just don't want to rely on the Americans to hold to their promises. And maybe it's because - for our own military needs - we do not want to be dependent on even an ally. Imagine telling the American people that GPS only works for as long as they stay friends with France. See how much uproar there is, even if they are allies at the moment.
It's leverage over Europe, that we don't need, and that the Americans have exercised in the Middle East. GPS, the commercial / public signal, was switched off and jammed because it might help set up attacks. So entire nations had fucked up GPS because the US thought someone was going to bomb somewhere. That's not a commercially-viable technology to navigate a ship or a plane by. And reason enough to build a replacement that has a bit more "local" control over it, but harms nobody.
"Eventually" I can do what I like. But if I can't run my old apps then it becomes a switch, not an upgade. And I could switch at any point I liked onto whatever else I wanted.
Support the old stuff WHILE showing how cool your new desktop is. And that it can do the old stuff just-as-well (if not better) and that, if you target it specifically, it can do even better.
ext3 would not exist if it hadn't been a viable upgrade / compatibility path from ext2. Same for FAT32. You have to support the old in order to get people to move to the new. Or otherwise, they will hang on for dear life until they are forced to switch, and then probably WON'T switch to your implementation because you forced them to.
Prove to me that I don't have to lose anything. Then you can show me your shiny new stuff.
I honestly don't care what they use.
The fact is, if I can program against the X libraries, and load up that have been programmed against the X libraries, and distribute programs that have been programmed against the X libraries, it needs to all "just work". And it needs to work as good as, or better than, X itself.
When you have that, it pretty much doesn't matter what faddy crap is underneath.
It's like if they replace ext2 with ext3, or ext3 with ext4. I don't care so long as I have tools to read the data, it works as a filesystem, and it has no downsides compared to the previous version. What my filesystem actually *is* is irrelevant so long as it works. What my display manager actually is is irrelevant so long as it works. And in the case of an X-compatible display manager, it has to work like X in all cases without me needing to make changes to my software.
That is, basically, the theory, yes. But if we can get that number down to "2" it proves a centuries-old conjecture that could lead to all sorts of interesting proofs of other things becoming true also.
In terms of computers:
You do realise that we use the difficulty of, in particular, finding large prime numbers as the basis for most modern security protocols implemented on computers? Precisely BECAUSE it's so hard to do?
We're not talking about 2, 3, 5, 7, etc. but we're talking about primes with MILLIONS of digits. Primes so large that even to prove they are prime can take a long time. Primes so enormous that multiplying two of them together makes a number that's almost impossible to factorise back to the correct original primes, so much so that we use it as the basis for things like SSL, TLS, etc.?
And, no, computers can't do mathematical proof. They can help as tools but they are dumb. You do not prove that every number to infinity has a prime within, say, 600 numbers by printing out every number. By definition you'll be there until infinity on even the fastest possible machine in the universe. You could prove that primes up to a number X that would hold true, but X would never be sufficient to prove it was always true. Just the fact that primes only have to be N numbers apart before you hit the next one could lead to mathematics that might well accelerate the discovery and manipulation of primes themselves.
But if you come up with a clever mathematical proof that GUARANTEES the answer, no matter what X is or how many billions of digits it has, without having to worry about ever finding a *particular* prime, then you have something that a mathematician can take as "fact" and incorporate into larger proofs about the universe. Imagine if we just assumed that every prime was like this, and applied it to a large scale engineering project, and then found out that actually - once you get past a few billion atoms - the premise doesn't hold? It'd be catastrophic.
The last "proof by computer" (i.e. by brute-force rather than as a tool) was the four-colour theorem. And even that was just because the problem could be reduced (by a mathematician, and using other proven theories, and logical inference) to a few thousand cases that the computer could iterate. It was used as a time-saver back in the days of manual calculation, not mathematical proof.
Stop relying on metal detectors and X-ray detectors to detect weapons, then.
Because for years there have been ceramic and other weapons that can walk right past them already.
If you want to make sure someone isn't carrying a gun, pat them down. And even that's not a guarantee.
Or maybe you could just outlaw them, and arrest anyone who has them, so you can be 99% sure, when someone approaches you, that they won't have been able to get a gun in the first place. Maybe that ought to be the first line of defence? And then after that, the other checks. And then realising that it's STILL not a guarantee without a full strip-search which is unreasonable and unpractical in all but the most secure areas (e.g. prisons).
They don't need to force a company to upload anything.
They just require the company's co-operation to inform them of the correct process to reproduce what they would normally do, and access to their systems. Pretty much if you get to that point, you already have that.
And, again, uploading an image of a newspaper isn't authentication that the message came from the people who set up the canary. Any agency could say "Okay, we require access to your systems to perform law enforcement tasks that you cannot be party to... now we scan in the newspaper and upload it ourselves... done."
Nobody has to force YOU to lie. They just have to have you demonstrate how THEY could lie using your systems. And that they can legally coerce you to do already. And non-cooperation will see you up in court for failing to comply with a valid court order, so 99% of people will comply.
The rest is just obvious.
Same reason the British AA (Automobile Association, not alcoholics) were formed and (later) forced to change their ways.
The whole point of the AA was formed to inform members of police speed traps. Back in the days of red-flags in front of vehicles held by a man. If your were an AA member, and there were no police around, an AA employee would be required to salute you.
If, however, there was a police trap present, they would not. Absence of the salute was seen as just such a canary to warn you despite being a "non-action". Eventually it was ruled illegal and the AA and the RAC both become just "vehicle breakdown" companies
When it comes down to it, if a court / police can argue that they need you NOT to trigger the canary (by inaction or otherwise), they will find a way to make you do it. They already redirect your DNS if they steal your domain, what's to stop them updating the canary themselves apart from a minor technical issue? All it will do is just get your whole domain seized to make you compliant.
ESPECIALLY if the entire point of the canary is to indicate to people whether you are subject to a (potentially LEGAL) court order not to reveal that you're under such an order. Little difference between that and you phoning up your buddy to warn him that you were just busted and the cops have his address - it's seen as deliberate evasion of the law. Even if the message is "I **WON'T** text you at 5pm if I've been raided".
The simple fact, though, is that such warrants are not a problem when they are legal and above-board. The problem is when they are not. Skirting the legal grey area yourself is not the correct response to the agencies skirting the legal grey areas.
If all else fails, they'll just institute a law to stop you doing things like this.
And the answer "The drivers are as supplied on the recovery disk" is not familiar to you?
They are a big OEM. They don't care about supporting these drivers in anything but an OS they have supplied. Like my last 15 years of putting Linux machines into schools, I would bet that any Linux driver is tied to only a particular kernel, and that without proper source, and that they never update it. They won't support other distros and unless you want to run Ubuntu 12.04 (specifically) for ever, you won't see much action above and beyond telling you to put the machine back into it's factory state (i.e with Ubuntu 12.04 and their driver how it's always been installed).
But more likely, it will have some cheap base hardware that's already "supported" by chance and they do nothing special to sell it as a Linux machine. And you won't get anything beyond the standard binaries.
I will happily still to my "chances" on some random hardware, like I've been doing for over a decade. The examples I cite are few and far between and usually because support for a certain type of machine / hardware was DROPPED from Linux distros rather than anything to do with it not actually being present at all.
I think you've just fallen for the advertising - it says Linux so it must mean ALL Linux forever with open-source code, right? My hardware from pre-1999 that says the same will happily prove you wrong. Sure, if you're lucky it had a 2.0/2.2 driver for it at some point, but you don't stand a chance of getting it working nowadays - and some of those drivers refused to install on anything but the "supported" distro.
The fact that this comes with Ubuntu tells you one of two things:
- They support ONLY Ubuntu
- or -
- Ubuntu does well enough supporting this with no help required.
P.S. I have sent computers back to companies that claimed Linux support, and I made a major UK distributor fight with their suppliers to get me a custom BIOS made for a laptop because they sold it to me as "supporting" Windows XP and then found out it wouldn't boot XP if you had encryption software (required by law in my field) because of a crappy BIOS bug. Literally, I had an AMI BIOS written, just for that laptop, just for me, because of how much money it was going to cost them if I had sent the laptops we'd bought on the basis of XP support back.
Trust me, doing the same for Linux is a LOT harder, especially when they can demonstrate that on ***A*** Linux with ***A*** driver that it works.
Am I the only one thinking that no matter how little I spent on getting a "real" knife, and sharpener, and whetstone, and all the other crap other commenters suggest, and the time spent researching, choosing, and maintaining such equipment, it still wouldn't be worth my time compared to doing it "wrong"?
Sorry, guys, but the food tastes the same no matter how you cut it, and 99% of the time the cut ends up in the blender or oven where it makes absolutely zero difference.
If you were into sailing, or even backwoods skills, or something like scuba diving where the right knife might save your life or save you literally SO MUCH TIME that it will be worth that, then maybe. But to slice a tomato? No.
Tell you what, I'll carry on chopping them with my old blunt kitchen knives and crap technique (honed over years of being clumsy-as-shite and the only way I can cut without chopping my fingers off) and enjoy the damn food, which will taste the same but have cost me less money overall for not buying some Victorinox (enough to make me cringe that you even mention that company's name, a sell-out maker who makes most of its money selling crap swiss-army knives) shite just to cut open an onion.
1) You wouldn't, obviously.
2) People cook for lots of reasons, not all of them are based on your argument.
3) Home cooking can be cheaper than anything you buy pre-cooked elsewhere - or else restaurants wouldn't be able to make a profit selling it.
4) Not everyone is a dolt in the kitchen. Home cooking is rarely a "dozen attempts" kind of thing if you have anywhere near half a brain and have done it a few times before. Those that are dolts need recipes to follow to become "non-dolts".
5) Home cooking can be prepared when you like, how you like, without having to try a dozen restaurants that are open when you want and where the cook is one that you happen to like (how many attempts would that take you, trying all your local restaurants?) - there isn't a "professional chef" in the world that will cook to you exact preferences, or else there's no point being a chef. You get what you're given, and the modifications you can make apply to the removal of certain ingredients and choosing how well done you want it.
6) Cooking, in itself, is a hobby.
More to the point, the argument I would propose, is why do you need to pay someone to tell you approximate proportions of ingredients when the web is full of millions of free recipes (many of them reviewed, and even ripped directly from recipe books without attribution) and you can't really "copyright" a recipe - you can copyright the exact text, the arrangement of them within a book, the photos of the dishes, etc. but there's not much to stop people sharing recipes and their own variations of your recipes.
My girlfriend's "recipe shelf" is full of more scrap cut out from newspapers, handwritten notebooks of recipes from friends/family, and photocopies of single recipes that she happened to like than anything else.
Linux-compatible does not mean anything more than "it works".
And, as far as I've been able to tell over the latest 10 years or so, Linux "works" on basically 99% of machines I've ever touched without having to do anything special (yes, I have jumped through hoops, but that's not the point - here someone else has jumped through those hoops for you).
Whether it works TO ITS FULL CAPACITY is another question entirely. For example, chances are that it's graphics chipset is "supported" but very, very slim that it enjoys full acceleration unless we're talking about an Intel chipset or a binary driver somewhere. And we can already do *that* anywhere we like.
The fuss about Linux drivers is no longer "does it work" (and hasn't been, for a long time) so much as "does it work as fully as possible?". And almost certainly, in a consumer laptop, the answer is no.
All this says is that their laptop happens to work in Linux with a certain configuration. There's no guarantee that it won't include a binary driver and/or only a certain Linux image being "supported" (i.e. working at all). And that leaves you off no better than a Windows machine that only comes with a recovery disk.
(For hoops that I've jumped through, try setting up your Linux partitions to mirror those of a Zip-disk on even boot/install USB disks, having to manually load soundfonts with a script to make soundcards work, or having to compile for some mini-ITX boards that can barely support the 486 instruction set to get an idea of the sorts of things that can crop up with old / embedded / poorly supported hardware).
13.3-inch touchscreen .... starting at $1,250
Er... No.
Quite what's the selling point here? A Linux-based touchscreen (can already get Linux-based tablets that size for much less)? Or a powerful laptop (can get much better laptops that don't cost that much even if you put a touchscreen onto them)?
Who's the customer here?
And people who don't understand their consumer rights and the point of a contract being "fair" in law often cave because they are told by the other party (who has an interest in lying) that there's nothing they can do about it.
Hint: You probably bought on credit card. You report it. If the credit card company pulls that shit, you take them to court.
Sure, it's a hassle, but you're in the right legally to stomp on that kind of shit.
Bundling shite with them, like your sister site Sourceforge does.
Other than that, if it survives a day, it stays on my computer forever. I never worry about disk space, and if I've downloaded something that fulfilled a purpose once, I keep it around in case I need it again.
About the only apps I've "uninstalled" have been ones that lasted literally seconds after I realised that they bundled tons of unnecessary shit in their installers and/or weren't what I was after.