Everyone who uses Facebook seems to be in their own little self-centered world anyway. That's why they bought Oculus. It simply matches.
No, Facebook bought Oculus because they are sitting on a pile of cash, and no good strategy for making profits. Facebook is not Google (which has a massive short term revenue stream), and it has no long term strategy for making social pay out the big bucks. Facebook also does not have the engineering talent to follow Googles "try everything" strategy, so Facebook is trying desperately to buy revenue diversity instead of creating it for themselves. Ultimately this is a loosing strategy, and a sign of weak / stupid management with very poor planning skills.
Buying Whatsapp was a gamble on that companies ability to monetize an otherwise non-revenue generating user base. Oculus likewise has no proven user base. For an established company like Microsoft or Google, this kind of acquisition makes sense, since they can eat the loss if the investment goes sour (they usually do). Facebook cannot afford to have any of these mega deals go bad. They simply do not have the revenue stream and they can never again go IPO and raise another pile of cash. So instead of sitting on the cash, and waiting for a strong investment opportunity, they are squandering the money like kids in a store. It is hauntingly reminiscent of the dot-com boom, and likely will end the same way.
Once you accept the notion of patents in the first place (as a temporary monopoly on something in return for disclosing it instead of keeping it secret), it's a very small jump to buying and selling them. If an independent inventor comes up with an idea but doesn't have the capital to bring it to market, they can sell the patent to a bigger company.
That right there is the problem. Ideas themselves are essentially worthless without the many thousands of hours of work involved in taking an idea to market. The real work is done by the people who develop the product. the idea itself has always been considered pretty much worthless. That is why venture capitalists care far less about the idea than they do about the inventor(s). They want people who get things done. The idea itself is almost irrelevant.
That is the real reason why so many people hate the patent system. It unjustly enriches the worthless turds who produce nothing of value, but insist on being paid for their "contribution".
Along those lines, Patents (and copyright) should be irrevocably granted to individuals, and transfer should be forbidden. If an individual wishes to make money from a product, let them do the real work involved in bringing that product to society.
What I want to know, is why my phone (the smallest model made) can hold 1100 hours of compressed audio... but these aircraft using NAND don't hold more than 2 hours of uncompressed audio (you don't want any quality sacrifices or artifacts from compression to screw up your analysis later) in a redundant array...
Most of the newest versions do hold far more than 2 hours, but the average age of the worlwide air fleet is around 15-20 years. That menas equipment that was commisioned in 2000 (and the designs having been finalized many years before that). replacing existing FDRs and CVRs is just not cost effective, and will not be done unless mandated by a government agency. Newer plnaes all have significantly more advanced equipment, largely because the newer equipment is actually cheaper than the old tape style, but the units have to be self powered, and handle uncompressed recording for many hours across at least 4 channels. That menas significant space, and more importantly, significant compute power which eats watts. Modern processors like the RPi and Beaglebone can handle the load, but, again, were talking about equipment that came off an assembly line decades ago.
There is no reason to write-off 10 year old ATMs. They are likely in good working order, and you can get spare parts. You do not throw away a 10 year old plane or helicopter either. These devices are more like elevators: Keep them in good order, and they will serve you well for a few decades. The only problem is that the people that selected the OS had no understanding at all what kind of device they were designing for.
Absolutely incorrect. These are network attached devices by definition. Without regular patches against newly discovered (but old) security threats, these machines would quickly become the targets of digital thieves, and subsequesntly be throurohgly owned...
Unlike Linux, when MS EOLs a product there is really no reliable way of ensuring its continued security, and banks are supposed to be risk averse, espeically the simple to understand kind of risks with no upside.
They really have no choice but to replace the machines and/or upgrade the OS.
I do not agree with some countries that subsidize artistic endeavors. Cuz then you have a selection of bureaucrats deciding which art is "art". But the laws regulating creative content should build an economy that rewards good work. to expect artists to make art just cuz is not fair, because everybody wants to make a living. maybe the GP should go back to completing his TPS reports, "just cuz".
So show me a system that gets the rewards to the people who are creating the content (also known as the hard part). The system we have now gives almost all of the rewards to the group that uses copyright to *prevent* easy distribution of works. It used to be that we needed these middle men because otherwise no one had the capital required to distribute works (also known as the expensive part). These are businessmen who used to provide value added, but no longer provide anything , and in fact now actively *remove* value from the product by preventing creator and consumer from interacting directly, and by preventing the end consumer from choosing how and when they want to use the content they have paid for. The Internet made the business model of the distributor obsolete, and yet we allow copyright to be used to subsidize these otherwise worthless human beings. They produce nothing, and they actively take from society without giving anything that anyone wants or needs.
All things considered, our society is worse off, with the continued support of copyright, than it would be without it. Now if someone comes up with something different, I'm all ears, but the copyright vs no copyright is a no brainer for anyone who can understand the bigger picture.
Why always picking on the HD manufacturers? Your GigE network runs at 1,000,000,000 bits per second, not 1,073,741,824, what a scam!
Data transmissions are based on resonant frequencies of reference crystals, and have no fundamental connection to a binary counting system (except perhaps in terms of harmonics). Hard disk drives use sectors which at some basic level have to be addressed by a powers of two binary addressing system. This means that no matter what else you do with sector sizes or block sizes, the binary counting system *always* comes into the picture. Base 10 by contrast is the interloper there.
Memory is measured in multiples of powers of two because that's how the addressing works. Disks and network have no such fundamental limitations - they count in sectors and frames, which are themselves not necessarily powers of two.
Wrong, and wrong again. *All* computer peripherals transmit data to and from computers encoded in binary signals. It means that all computer based addressing is essentially binary. Back in the early years, some bit twiddling idiot tried to force a decimal system onto computers (see BCD) The whole thing was such a stupid idea it was pretty effectively dropped for almost everything except scientific computing, and even there it wouldn't really be necessary if those pesky scientists were half as smart as they think they are.
Thay're not saying that gravity waves are creating the signals. What they are saying is that if gravity waves are creating any signals at all, the size of the signals being measured limits the possible size of the gravity waves to smaller than a certain size. It is putting an upper bound on the possible size of gravity waves. This is important, because the previously determined upper bound on gravity wave size was 9 orders of magnitude bigger than it is now that we have these experimental results.
Not unsafe? The likelyhood of failure is higher than you think! Trying to contain the atomic dragon is a fools errand. The story dosent end with safe operation, even if that was possible? The waste products are still a major unsafe factor! Radioactive metals contain much more power than you realize. Not unsafe, tell that to the people affected by ionizing radiation, everyone on earth has an increased risk of cancer due to the atomic age! Don't be fooled by lack of published data linking it up! Radiation in your body from fusion isotopes are detectable! No where on the planet remains unaffected.
All of humanities activities carry with them a certain degree of danger. The more energy involved, the more dangerous they become. A significant amount of effort must be placed in decreasing those dangers, but there will always be danger.
Unless you plan to give up your computer, car, mass transit, pretty much all mass produced goods, and go back to an egrarian lifestyle, you will have to deal with industrial accidents. Engineers are pretty good at preventing known types of accidents from re-occuring, but the unknown will always cause bad things to happen. Claiming that Nuclear is worse than the alternatives just betrays your own ignorance. Indeed, we had all been largely ignorant of fossil fuels consequences for decades, but the use of Oil, Gas and Coal may have had far more dire consequences for the future of humanity than all of the radiation disasters put together. The liklihood that something else, we have been doing since the dawn of the industrial revolution, will be the death of us all is greater than the chance that nuclear will be our downfall.
In the end, so called "renewable" resources may be our best bet, but they are not sufficient for our needs currently, and may never be, and who knows what genie those technologies have bottled up for the future.
In the far distant future, mankind will have solved universe spanning power production using some technology we cant comprehend yet. In 1000 years, who knows what breakthrough power generation system we will use, but holding our breath waiting for a breakthrough will overwhelmingly likely end with all of us sitting in the dark. In 500 years, we most likely won't be using fossil fuels anymore because we probably wont have any more to use), and I'd give long odds that if we still have a global economy by that time, the underpinnings will be a fission or fusion power grid. Nothing else has the where-with-all to produce the power we have come to demand.
Wow, that's just bizarre. I don't know where you get your misinformation, but it's an elite grade of batshit.
I get my information by using the tools. I work with embedded machines where every instruction counts, and Boost as mentioned is good, but will never be competitive with homegrown C/C++ code purpose built for the task. The container classes all add great flexibility, but that comes with a performance hit. The folks behind Boost have done a great job of keeping it to a minimum, but its there nonetheless. Just because compute power keeps getting faster each year doesn't change the fact that you can't increase the power of an embedded system once its in the wild without spending more than the device is typically worth. That means you have to keep within your processor capacity today, and you have to leave enough for future software updates.
You sound like you come from a financial background, so let me educate you a little about the rest of the world: Most embedded software (>99% of the execution cycles in existence run on embedded systems) is made custom because the cost of processors is not trivial. When you are buying HFT servers that are involved with trades that net millions of dollars, nobody cares if the servers costs an extra $10,000 or not. In embedded systems where you can expect to sell millions of units, a difference of a penny in the final unit cost is enough to justify having an engineer spend an entire year shaving that penny off the cost. Shaving processor cycles allows you to use a cheaper processor, which can save on the order of dollars. Needless to say that under those circumstances, the "minimal performance hit" of Boost costs far more money than it saves, and consequently is unacceptable for production use.
As these devices get closer and closer to "invisible" technology, it starts to lend some credibility to the idea that someday humans will be able to be retrofitted with various ESP-like abilities...
No, of course not. When you call a library funnction, do you count all the lines of code in the library? When you write a for loop, do you count all the lines of assembly it compiles into? No. The number of lines you count is the number of lines you write.?
Unless you're a useless bit pusher, you make sure you fully comprehend the ramifications of *every* library you use. For example, Boost is really sweet when you need to slam together a pile of code and have it working out of the gate with minimal fuss, but if performance is an issue, you cant use it. If you need to understand where every processor cycle goes, even C may be too high level for you... In short, Wolfram isnt for programmers, its more for IT / administrators.
The real test of a language is what the source for the compiler and the libraries looks like
How is that different from Chrome OS and FireFox OS?
Seriously?
Just in case you're not a troll, Both Chrome OS and Firefox OS are open source, meaning that, (by definition), parts can be swapped in and out at will. More importantly, both Chrome OS, and Firefox OS are based on Linux which means that they are Posix compliant. They also use the basic structure that Linux uses, which offers the compartmentalization and standardized APIs I mentioned.
The shell is a BIG part of the OS. I'm not sure most of the complainers actually know what they are saying
Only because MS designed it that way, and their reasons for designing that way had nothing to do with providing a "better" solution for the end user. It had everything to do with designing a system that was so tightly integrated that various parts could not be substituted. MS wanted to do everything they could to prevent third parties from offering replacements for part of their OS, as that would ultimately undermine their monopoly. A properly designed system has all of the parts compartmentalized so that individual parts can be replaced so long as they conform to the apropriate APIs. This is true for programs, electrical designs, buildings, mechanical structures, everything engineering related. MS deliberatly ignored centuries of engineering best practices to build their monstrocity. Just look how difficult it has been to create a stable eumlator for windows (wine). We have excelent DOS emulators, excelent PS2, Wii, etc emulators, but Windows remains the one place we do not have a good emulator. This is because it was built to be belidgerant...
MS was never properly punished for their behavior, either by the market, nor the regulatory bodies. Consequently, they think they are above the law (Hence Windows 8). I for one will not be satisifed until MS is wiped from this earth and Gates and Balmer are safely away from their Ill gotten fortune.
After each class, the kids can put a thumbs up or thumbs down next to a teachers name for performance, comportment, engagement, and subject knowledge. Give the other students the chance to make informed decisions about whether to opt out of their class or switch schools.
Absolutely, becasue primary school students are always mature enough to handle that kind of thing responsibly
Coming from the aerospace industry, you cannot have software that has bugs. And if there was the possibility of a software bug, you have to prove that you can mitigate the effect in hardware.
For an industry that claimed such high standards, they did a remarkable job of missing the semi obvious effects of mechanical failures. Funny, but some of their engineers even went so far as to tell them that their mechanical systems had possibly failed and or were likely to fail. Long story short, they should have paid a little less attention to proving their software was perfect, and a little more attnention to proving their hardware wouldn't suddenly explode, and/or fall off for no good goram reason.
If the safety of your system relies solely on software functioning perfectly, then you haven't done a very good job of thinking through your system design. Its right up there with routing all three redundant hydraulic system through the same area and stating that you're all good because you have redundancy. It completely ignores the problems arising from mechanical failures that are the result of an area effect. Instead of three redundant systems, two with armor would be more effective at covering all of the various failure modes.
CEO salary is determined by investors, those who are taking risks in the company and hired him to take care of their investment in that company.
No, CEO pay is not determined by investors, it is usually decided upon by an executive compensation committee whom the board of directors has selected. Individual investors have about as much say in the whole process as individual voters have in controlling the laws that congress passes. For all intents and purposes, they two are wholy separate. I would agree that the process is working, if each individual investor got to select what percentage of their share of the profits should go to CEO compensation. Let the CEOs earn their pay the way politicians do. Make them campaign for it. Make them explain to every investor what they are doing to earn that pay. If each investor had real control over their own piece, you would find CEO compensation to be far more reasonable, and far more tied to their performance...
If you do not like the fact that taxpayers are bailing them out then take that up with your idiot, beholden senators and representatives.
Bailing out the banks was not optional. Congress failing to act when the crash happened would have resulted in deaths. Even a 50% colapse of our global economy would cause millions of people to starve to death or die fighting for food. A 90% collapse would kill half the population in the US in the first winter alone. We have built a system where the banks are in the position where they are too big to fail. If we let them fail, the economy colapses.
It all goes back to the way companies pay their employees. Back in the 19th century and before, companies kept huge cash reserves so that when they issued payroll checks, the checks didn't bounce. for a company like GM or UPS, that payroll reserve would be on the order of billions of dollars. With the advent of the modern banking sector, a brilliant banker thought up the idea of payroll lines of credit. This allows a company to spend its entire payroll reserve, and if there isn't enough in the coffers, they temporarily run a line of credit until the funds come in. In practice, this allows the company to average pretty close to zero in their payroll accounts. It means that companies can re-invest that money into growth.
The down side to that, is what happens when a bank is insolvent. That bank can not loan any money (they dont have any to lend), so they close their customers payroll accounts. Now, the bank can't honor withdrawls because they have no cash, and the companies have not paid their employees because they have no payroll credit account anymore, and they dont keep cash reservces anymore. Now, the employees cant buy anything because they have no cash, cant get cash, and the ATM/debit cards arent working anymore. So they stop buying *anything*. Now they cycle gets viscous. Companies no longer have any income because people have no money, so they cant even honor their outstanding payroll, nevermind next weeks paychecks.
If one bank does it, the economy can absorb the hit. If 25% of the banking sector does it, the shock waves will eventually (a few months out) colapse the entire banking sector, and with it everything else. Everything stops. This happened with the great depression, but at that time the credit economy was only 30% of the whole economy. Today, the credit economy accounts for 98% of the worlds economy. You take that away, and its like taking away 98% of the air under an airplane. It simply cant function, and the result is gonna be messy.
The Banker? Because without him, those technology CEO's wouldn't have any money to make things and contribute to society.
Horse crap. When the technology company critically needed money, the investment bankers are nowhere to be found. The only people that will put money in that direction are the angel investors. The bankers only become involved when all of the real risk has been removed. Without investment bankers, companies would still be formed and grow, it would just be a much slower, more natural, growth. Investment bankers are, as stated, parasites.
It should be clear by now that the productive forces have outgrown the capitalist mode of production, that capitalism is now a fetter on them. But capitalism has created its own gravediggers, the modern proletariat, who whith their revolutionary ascent will clear the way for the socialist future!
Dude, Communism had its run, it looked dynamite on paper, but here in the really real world, it failed. While I agree that Capitalism is looking to follow Comunism down the same drain, what we need is something new, not a rehash of the same tired ideas. Show me something that provides institutional protection of individuals from the indescriminate hoarding of the greedy. Show me a system that reduces a persons power and influence as their wealth increases. Show me a system that rewards creativity over greed, but still recognizes and rewards hard work. Show me something that might fit that bill, and we'll talk. Until then, what you've got is empty rhetoric and three quarters of a century of failure.
I'm inclined to agree with your conclusion, but really, "seven Tesla employees"? (emphasis added).
Absolutely, I'm surprised it wasnt more. Tesla is still a relatively small car company, and every employee there has alot of "skin in the game" so to speak. Most likely, the Tesla group consisted of: Two engineers, Probably a battery specialist, and someone familier with the high power electronics. You're going to get the individual who is responsible for the entire engineering team who designed the model. Probably a VP and a product manager as well. Thats five without batting an eye. Thats just the technical team. Now you're going to have someone who is Teslas equivalent of an insurance adjuster, and probably the company lawyer. Given the high profile potential of these cases, probably the companies lead counsel. Thats seven. They could have brought any number of other specialists with them as well.
Tesla will want two questions answered *very* quickly: First, What caused the fire? Second, can / will it happen again.
Hub motors require all kinds of computer control, with associated high chances of fault that could much more easily lead to loss of control or efficiency. Hub motor efficiency is kind of like video poker: perfect play for 3 years straight will net you a profit, absolutely, no question you will beat the casino; the profit is small, and a single small mistake will set you back about 85 years. It only makes sense in a motorcycle, where you have one rear wheel hub motor.
I'm curious what leads you to those statements. What kind of extra computer control do hub wheels require beyond the obvious need for 4x the raw power transistors? What kind of problems would lead to reduced efficiency vs a single drive motor? Do hub motors have a different efficiency profile? something specific to the geometry of a hub wheel?
I would have thought that having 4 hub wheels would provide an opportunity for more efficient traction control, and better regenerative braking efficiency than a single differentially connected drivetrain.
I have an obvious solution for you. MOVE.
That's what I've had to do for years, just to stay employed. My last move was 200 miles. The one before that was 650 miles.
I see my family a week at Thanksgiving and a week at Christmas. Sure that sucks, but it's what I had to do in order to avoid what you're going through.
Its not that simple, My wife and I both work. We both have to. I still make slightly more, but my wife works for the state, and consequently still has decent benefits. If either one of us had to move to get another job, it would effectively unemploy the other. The odds of both of us being able to get new jobs simultaneously in divergent fields is low enough to make the prospect pretty much pointless. I have had several head hunters bring up opportunities for me in other states, but in locations where my wife would be unable to find work, so once again, we are talking about effectively unemploying one of us.
Not everyone is in a position where they are responsible only for themselves, and even if they are, It sucks having to upend an entire life because our governing corporate bodies no longer feel the need to uphold their end of the social contract.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone who uses Facebook seems to be in their own little self-centered world anyway. That's why they bought Oculus. It simply matches.
No, Facebook bought Oculus because they are sitting on a pile of cash, and no good strategy for making profits. Facebook is not Google (which has a massive short term revenue stream), and it has no long term strategy for making social pay out the big bucks. Facebook also does not have the engineering talent to follow Googles "try everything" strategy, so Facebook is trying desperately to buy revenue diversity instead of creating it for themselves. Ultimately this is a loosing strategy, and a sign of weak / stupid management with very poor planning skills.
Buying Whatsapp was a gamble on that companies ability to monetize an otherwise non-revenue generating user base. Oculus likewise has no proven user base. For an established company like Microsoft or Google, this kind of acquisition makes sense, since they can eat the loss if the investment goes sour (they usually do). Facebook cannot afford to have any of these mega deals go bad. They simply do not have the revenue stream and they can never again go IPO and raise another pile of cash. So instead of sitting on the cash, and waiting for a strong investment opportunity, they are squandering the money like kids in a store. It is hauntingly reminiscent of the dot-com boom, and likely will end the same way.
Once you accept the notion of patents in the first place (as a temporary monopoly on something in return for disclosing it instead of keeping it secret), it's a very small jump to buying and selling them. If an independent inventor comes up with an idea but doesn't have the capital to bring it to market, they can sell the patent to a bigger company.
That right there is the problem. Ideas themselves are essentially worthless without the many thousands of hours of work involved in taking an idea to market. The real work is done by the people who develop the product. the idea itself has always been considered pretty much worthless. That is why venture capitalists care far less about the idea than they do about the inventor(s). They want people who get things done. The idea itself is almost irrelevant.
That is the real reason why so many people hate the patent system. It unjustly enriches the worthless turds who produce nothing of value, but insist on being paid for their "contribution".
Along those lines, Patents (and copyright) should be irrevocably granted to individuals, and transfer should be forbidden. If an individual wishes to make money from a product, let them do the real work involved in bringing that product to society.
What I want to know, is why my phone (the smallest model made) can hold 1100 hours of compressed audio ... but these aircraft using NAND don't hold more than 2 hours of uncompressed audio (you don't want any quality sacrifices or artifacts from compression to screw up your analysis later) in a redundant array ...
Most of the newest versions do hold far more than 2 hours, but the average age of the worlwide air fleet is around 15-20 years. That menas equipment that was commisioned in 2000 (and the designs having been finalized many years before that). replacing existing FDRs and CVRs is just not cost effective, and will not be done unless mandated by a government agency. Newer plnaes all have significantly more advanced equipment, largely because the newer equipment is actually cheaper than the old tape style, but the units have to be self powered, and handle uncompressed recording for many hours across at least 4 channels. That menas significant space, and more importantly, significant compute power which eats watts. Modern processors like the RPi and Beaglebone can handle the load, but, again, were talking about equipment that came off an assembly line decades ago.
Yup...
The almighty dollar wins again
There is no reason to write-off 10 year old ATMs. They are likely in good working order, and you can get spare parts. You do not throw away a 10 year old plane or helicopter either. These devices are more like elevators: Keep them in good order, and they will serve you well for a few decades. The only problem is that the people that selected the OS had no understanding at all what kind of device they were designing for.
Absolutely incorrect. These are network attached devices by definition. Without regular patches against newly discovered (but old) security threats, these machines would quickly become the targets of digital thieves, and subsequesntly be throurohgly owned...
Unlike Linux, when MS EOLs a product there is really no reliable way of ensuring its continued security, and banks are supposed to be risk averse, espeically the simple to understand kind of risks with no upside.
They really have no choice but to replace the machines and/or upgrade the OS.
I do not agree with some countries that subsidize artistic endeavors. Cuz then you have a selection of bureaucrats deciding which art is "art". But the laws regulating creative content should build an economy that rewards good work. to expect artists to make art just cuz is not fair, because everybody wants to make a living. maybe the GP should go back to completing his TPS reports, "just cuz".
So show me a system that gets the rewards to the people who are creating the content (also known as the hard part). The system we have now gives almost all of the rewards to the group that uses copyright to *prevent* easy distribution of works. It used to be that we needed these middle men because otherwise no one had the capital required to distribute works (also known as the expensive part). These are businessmen who used to provide value added, but no longer provide anything , and in fact now actively *remove* value from the product by preventing creator and consumer from interacting directly, and by preventing the end consumer from choosing how and when they want to use the content they have paid for. The Internet made the business model of the distributor obsolete, and yet we allow copyright to be used to subsidize these otherwise worthless human beings. They produce nothing, and they actively take from society without giving anything that anyone wants or needs.
All things considered, our society is worse off, with the continued support of copyright, than it would be without it. Now if someone comes up with something different, I'm all ears, but the copyright vs no copyright is a no brainer for anyone who can understand the bigger picture.
Why always picking on the HD manufacturers? Your GigE network runs at 1,000,000,000 bits per second, not 1,073,741,824, what a scam!
Data transmissions are based on resonant frequencies of reference crystals, and have no fundamental connection to a binary counting system (except perhaps in terms of harmonics). Hard disk drives use sectors which at some basic level have to be addressed by a powers of two binary addressing system. This means that no matter what else you do with sector sizes or block sizes, the binary counting system *always* comes into the picture. Base 10 by contrast is the interloper there.
Memory is measured in multiples of powers of two because that's how the addressing works. Disks and network have no such fundamental limitations - they count in sectors and frames, which are themselves not necessarily powers of two.
Wrong, and wrong again. *All* computer peripherals transmit data to and from computers encoded in binary signals. It means that all computer based addressing is essentially binary. Back in the early years, some bit twiddling idiot tried to force a decimal system onto computers (see BCD) The whole thing was such a stupid idea it was pretty effectively dropped for almost everything except scientific computing, and even there it wouldn't really be necessary if those pesky scientists were half as smart as they think they are.
Thay're not saying that gravity waves are creating the signals. What they are saying is that if gravity waves are creating any signals at all, the size of the signals being measured limits the possible size of the gravity waves to smaller than a certain size. It is putting an upper bound on the possible size of gravity waves. This is important, because the previously determined upper bound on gravity wave size was 9 orders of magnitude bigger than it is now that we have these experimental results.
Not unsafe? The likelyhood of failure is higher than you think! Trying to contain the atomic dragon is a fools errand. The story dosent end with safe operation, even if that was possible? The waste products are still a major unsafe factor! Radioactive metals contain much more power than you realize. Not unsafe, tell that to the people affected by ionizing radiation, everyone on earth has an increased risk of cancer due to the atomic age! Don't be fooled by lack of published data linking it up! Radiation in your body from fusion isotopes are detectable! No where on the planet remains unaffected.
All of humanities activities carry with them a certain degree of danger. The more energy involved, the more dangerous they become. A significant amount of effort must be placed in decreasing those dangers, but there will always be danger.
Unless you plan to give up your computer, car, mass transit, pretty much all mass produced goods, and go back to an egrarian lifestyle, you will have to deal with industrial accidents. Engineers are pretty good at preventing known types of accidents from re-occuring, but the unknown will always cause bad things to happen. Claiming that Nuclear is worse than the alternatives just betrays your own ignorance. Indeed, we had all been largely ignorant of fossil fuels consequences for decades, but the use of Oil, Gas and Coal may have had far more dire consequences for the future of humanity than all of the radiation disasters put together. The liklihood that something else, we have been doing since the dawn of the industrial revolution, will be the death of us all is greater than the chance that nuclear will be our downfall.
In the end, so called "renewable" resources may be our best bet, but they are not sufficient for our needs currently, and may never be, and who knows what genie those technologies have bottled up for the future.
In the far distant future, mankind will have solved universe spanning power production using some technology we cant comprehend yet. In 1000 years, who knows what breakthrough power generation system we will use, but holding our breath waiting for a breakthrough will overwhelmingly likely end with all of us sitting in the dark. In 500 years, we most likely won't be using fossil fuels anymore because we probably wont have any more to use), and I'd give long odds that if we still have a global economy by that time, the underpinnings will be a fission or fusion power grid. Nothing else has the where-with-all to produce the power we have come to demand.
Wow, that's just bizarre. I don't know where you get your misinformation, but it's an elite grade of batshit.
I get my information by using the tools. I work with embedded machines where every instruction counts, and Boost as mentioned is good, but will never be competitive with homegrown C/C++ code purpose built for the task. The container classes all add great flexibility, but that comes with a performance hit. The folks behind Boost have done a great job of keeping it to a minimum, but its there nonetheless. Just because compute power keeps getting faster each year doesn't change the fact that you can't increase the power of an embedded system once its in the wild without spending more than the device is typically worth. That means you have to keep within your processor capacity today, and you have to leave enough for future software updates.
You sound like you come from a financial background, so let me educate you a little about the rest of the world: Most embedded software (>99% of the execution cycles in existence run on embedded systems) is made custom because the cost of processors is not trivial. When you are buying HFT servers that are involved with trades that net millions of dollars, nobody cares if the servers costs an extra $10,000 or not. In embedded systems where you can expect to sell millions of units, a difference of a penny in the final unit cost is enough to justify having an engineer spend an entire year shaving that penny off the cost. Shaving processor cycles allows you to use a cheaper processor, which can save on the order of dollars. Needless to say that under those circumstances, the "minimal performance hit" of Boost costs far more money than it saves, and consequently is unacceptable for production use.
As these devices get closer and closer to "invisible" technology, it starts to lend some credibility to the idea that someday humans will be able to be retrofitted with various ESP-like abilities...
Ok, break out your tinfoil hats *now*
No, of course not. When you call a library funnction, do you count all the lines of code in the library? When you write a for loop, do you count all the lines of assembly it compiles into? No. The number of lines you count is the number of lines you write.?
Unless you're a useless bit pusher, you make sure you fully comprehend the ramifications of *every* library you use. For example, Boost is really sweet when you need to slam together a pile of code and have it working out of the gate with minimal fuss, but if performance is an issue, you cant use it. If you need to understand where every processor cycle goes, even C may be too high level for you... In short, Wolfram isnt for programmers, its more for IT / administrators.
The real test of a language is what the source for the compiler and the libraries looks like
Woosh
How is that different from Chrome OS and FireFox OS?
Seriously?
Just in case you're not a troll, Both Chrome OS and Firefox OS are open source, meaning that, (by definition), parts can be swapped in and out at will. More importantly, both Chrome OS, and Firefox OS are based on Linux which means that they are Posix compliant. They also use the basic structure that Linux uses, which offers the compartmentalization and standardized APIs I mentioned.
The shell is a BIG part of the OS. I'm not sure most of the complainers actually know what they are saying
Only because MS designed it that way, and their reasons for designing that way had nothing to do with providing a "better" solution for the end user. It had everything to do with designing a system that was so tightly integrated that various parts could not be substituted. MS wanted to do everything they could to prevent third parties from offering replacements for part of their OS, as that would ultimately undermine their monopoly. A properly designed system has all of the parts compartmentalized so that individual parts can be replaced so long as they conform to the apropriate APIs. This is true for programs, electrical designs, buildings, mechanical structures, everything engineering related. MS deliberatly ignored centuries of engineering best practices to build their monstrocity. Just look how difficult it has been to create a stable eumlator for windows (wine). We have excelent DOS emulators, excelent PS2, Wii, etc emulators, but Windows remains the one place we do not have a good emulator. This is because it was built to be belidgerant...
MS was never properly punished for their behavior, either by the market, nor the regulatory bodies. Consequently, they think they are above the law (Hence Windows 8). I for one will not be satisifed until MS is wiped from this earth and Gates and Balmer are safely away from their Ill gotten fortune.
After each class, the kids can put a thumbs up or thumbs down next to a teachers name for performance, comportment, engagement, and subject knowledge. Give the other students the chance to make informed decisions about whether to opt out of their class or switch schools.
Absolutely, becasue primary school students are always mature enough to handle that kind of thing responsibly
Coming from the aerospace industry, you cannot have software that has bugs. And if there was the possibility of a software bug, you have to prove that you can mitigate the effect in hardware.
For an industry that claimed such high standards, they did a remarkable job of missing the semi obvious effects of mechanical failures. Funny, but some of their engineers even went so far as to tell them that their mechanical systems had possibly failed and or were likely to fail. Long story short, they should have paid a little less attention to proving their software was perfect, and a little more attnention to proving their hardware wouldn't suddenly explode, and/or fall off for no good goram reason.
If the safety of your system relies solely on software functioning perfectly, then you haven't done a very good job of thinking through your system design. Its right up there with routing all three redundant hydraulic system through the same area and stating that you're all good because you have redundancy. It completely ignores the problems arising from mechanical failures that are the result of an area effect. Instead of three redundant systems, two with armor would be more effective at covering all of the various failure modes.
CEO salary is determined by investors, those who are taking risks in the company and hired him to take care of their investment in that company.
No, CEO pay is not determined by investors, it is usually decided upon by an executive compensation committee whom the board of directors has selected. Individual investors have about as much say in the whole process as individual voters have in controlling the laws that congress passes. For all intents and purposes, they two are wholy separate. I would agree that the process is working, if each individual investor got to select what percentage of their share of the profits should go to CEO compensation. Let the CEOs earn their pay the way politicians do. Make them campaign for it. Make them explain to every investor what they are doing to earn that pay. If each investor had real control over their own piece, you would find CEO compensation to be far more reasonable, and far more tied to their performance...
If you do not like the fact that taxpayers are bailing them out then take that up with your idiot, beholden senators and representatives.
Bailing out the banks was not optional. Congress failing to act when the crash happened would have resulted in deaths. Even a 50% colapse of our global economy would cause millions of people to starve to death or die fighting for food. A 90% collapse would kill half the population in the US in the first winter alone. We have built a system where the banks are in the position where they are too big to fail. If we let them fail, the economy colapses.
It all goes back to the way companies pay their employees. Back in the 19th century and before, companies kept huge cash reserves so that when they issued payroll checks, the checks didn't bounce. for a company like GM or UPS, that payroll reserve would be on the order of billions of dollars. With the advent of the modern banking sector, a brilliant banker thought up the idea of payroll lines of credit. This allows a company to spend its entire payroll reserve, and if there isn't enough in the coffers, they temporarily run a line of credit until the funds come in. In practice, this allows the company to average pretty close to zero in their payroll accounts. It means that companies can re-invest that money into growth.
The down side to that, is what happens when a bank is insolvent. That bank can not loan any money (they dont have any to lend), so they close their customers payroll accounts. Now, the bank can't honor withdrawls because they have no cash, and the companies have not paid their employees because they have no payroll credit account anymore, and they dont keep cash reservces anymore. Now, the employees cant buy anything because they have no cash, cant get cash, and the ATM/debit cards arent working anymore. So they stop buying *anything*. Now they cycle gets viscous. Companies no longer have any income because people have no money, so they cant even honor their outstanding payroll, nevermind next weeks paychecks.
If one bank does it, the economy can absorb the hit. If 25% of the banking sector does it, the shock waves will eventually (a few months out) colapse the entire banking sector, and with it everything else. Everything stops. This happened with the great depression, but at that time the credit economy was only 30% of the whole economy. Today, the credit economy accounts for 98% of the worlds economy. You take that away, and its like taking away 98% of the air under an airplane. It simply cant function, and the result is gonna be messy.
The Banker? Because without him, those technology CEO's wouldn't have any money to make things and contribute to society.
Horse crap. When the technology company critically needed money, the investment bankers are nowhere to be found. The only people that will put money in that direction are the angel investors. The bankers only become involved when all of the real risk has been removed. Without investment bankers, companies would still be formed and grow, it would just be a much slower, more natural, growth. Investment bankers are, as stated, parasites.
It should be clear by now that the productive forces have outgrown the capitalist mode of production, that capitalism is now a fetter on them. But capitalism has created its own gravediggers, the modern proletariat, who whith their revolutionary ascent will clear the way for the socialist future!
Dude, Communism had its run, it looked dynamite on paper, but here in the really real world, it failed. While I agree that Capitalism is looking to follow Comunism down the same drain, what we need is something new, not a rehash of the same tired ideas. Show me something that provides institutional protection of individuals from the indescriminate hoarding of the greedy. Show me a system that reduces a persons power and influence as their wealth increases. Show me a system that rewards creativity over greed, but still recognizes and rewards hard work. Show me something that might fit that bill, and we'll talk. Until then, what you've got is empty rhetoric and three quarters of a century of failure.
I'm inclined to agree with your conclusion, but really, "seven Tesla employees"? (emphasis added).
Absolutely, I'm surprised it wasnt more. Tesla is still a relatively small car company, and every employee there has alot of "skin in the game" so to speak. Most likely, the Tesla group consisted of: Two engineers, Probably a battery specialist, and someone familier with the high power electronics. You're going to get the individual who is responsible for the entire engineering team who designed the model. Probably a VP and a product manager as well. Thats five without batting an eye. Thats just the technical team. Now you're going to have someone who is Teslas equivalent of an insurance adjuster, and probably the company lawyer. Given the high profile potential of these cases, probably the companies lead counsel. Thats seven. They could have brought any number of other specialists with them as well.
Tesla will want two questions answered *very* quickly: First, What caused the fire? Second, can / will it happen again.
Hub motors require all kinds of computer control, with associated high chances of fault that could much more easily lead to loss of control or efficiency. Hub motor efficiency is kind of like video poker: perfect play for 3 years straight will net you a profit, absolutely, no question you will beat the casino; the profit is small, and a single small mistake will set you back about 85 years. It only makes sense in a motorcycle, where you have one rear wheel hub motor.
I'm curious what leads you to those statements. What kind of extra computer control do hub wheels require beyond the obvious need for 4x the raw power transistors? What kind of problems would lead to reduced efficiency vs a single drive motor? Do hub motors have a different efficiency profile? something specific to the geometry of a hub wheel?
I would have thought that having 4 hub wheels would provide an opportunity for more efficient traction control, and better regenerative braking efficiency than a single differentially connected drivetrain.
What am I missing?
We're all getting government funded security theatre right now.
Fixed that for you
I have an obvious solution for you. MOVE. That's what I've had to do for years, just to stay employed. My last move was 200 miles. The one before that was 650 miles. I see my family a week at Thanksgiving and a week at Christmas. Sure that sucks, but it's what I had to do in order to avoid what you're going through.
Its not that simple, My wife and I both work. We both have to. I still make slightly more, but my wife works for the state, and consequently still has decent benefits. If either one of us had to move to get another job, it would effectively unemploy the other. The odds of both of us being able to get new jobs simultaneously in divergent fields is low enough to make the prospect pretty much pointless. I have had several head hunters bring up opportunities for me in other states, but in locations where my wife would be unable to find work, so once again, we are talking about effectively unemploying one of us.
Not everyone is in a position where they are responsible only for themselves, and even if they are, It sucks having to upend an entire life because our governing corporate bodies no longer feel the need to uphold their end of the social contract.