But at this point it's gone so far that either he becomes president or you'll have riots from coast to coast.
Riots are possible the other direction too you know.
In fact, I think the political system in the USA has become so divisive, and so hostile at this point, that civil war is almost inevitable. Probably not in this election cycle, but I don't know how much more of this sort of politics the nation can withstand. Each side of every election tries harder and harder to tell everyone that if you don't vote for their candidate that you are a horrible and unpatriotic American who wants to destroy the country. People are starting to believe it. And when some parts of the population actively despise other parts of the population with the amount of vitriol that the 2 parties want, how long before it boils over?
Technically the electoral college hasn't voted Trump in. That said, the odds are extremely high that they will in fact do that, but there is actually no requirement that they do.
That however is not a saving grace of the system, in fact it's a massive flaw that needs to be fixed. Having unaccountable people who nobody knows deciding on the President of the US is not a good thing, even if they tend to vote the way their state population asked them to.
US elections baffle me. You use optical scanners? We use humans.
Our ballots are recorded with paper and pencil, and counted manually. Voting takes the average person no more than 10 minutes from the time they arrive at the polling station, until they have finished casting their ballot (yes, we actually have enough polling stations that we don't have long lines), and we have election results within an hour or two of the polls closing (short of any re-counts), and the process is transparent, and easily audited.
Why does the US continue to try to make voting as difficult and complex as possible? Is it really the end goal of the US government to prevent people from voting?
While you may be right that no hacking was involved. How would one know?
You need "proof" before you can accuse the machine, but the machines are designed specifically to avoid any such proof.
The machines are black boxes that nobody is allowed to audit, there is no paper record of what happened, and short of each and every person who voted testifying under oath as to what they chose and it not lining up with the results, there's no way to prove what actually happened. Even then, someone would accuse a percentage of those testifying under oath of lying and insist the electronic machines were right.
Without any possible way of auditing the results, these machines are really no better than a random number generator.
With paper ballots this is easy, you have observers from each party at the polling station. Each voter takes their ballot, marks it, and then places it in a ballot box. The observers make sure the ballot boxes aren't tampered with until they are unsealed after the polls close, and are counted in front of the observers. Once the votes are counted they are placed back in the boxes under the supervision of the observers, and the boxes are sealed and stored for possible later re-counts.
This leaves each elector knowing that what they wrote on the paper got in to the ballot box unaltered, and each party's observer stops anyone from tampering with the ballot boxes before they are counted, and ensures the counting is fair. Nobody knows who voted for who, but they do know that the votes that were cast are the same ones being counted.
This is how civilized countries run elections.
Then of course there are the corrupt places that eliminate critical parts of this system in the hopes of rigging elections. For example places that get rid of paper ballots, or observers, or where the person marking the ballot doesn't place it in the box themselves, or places where someone other than the person marking the ballot gets to see what's on the ballot. But only a truly corrupt regime would implement any of those policies.
Typical satellite ping times are to geostationary, not LEO.when you add over 20,000 miles each way to the trip, you tend to add some latency. LEO ping times wouldn't be all that bad.
The big question that might affect the latency though will be how many downlink stations they have. If a signal has to bounce around the constellation until it reaches one downlink station in one place on the planet, that will add a lot of latency, but if they set it up so that each satellite is always (or almost always) within reach of a downlink somewhere, the latency will be minimal.
Because nobody wants to buy from the "legitimate" sellers because it's twice as expensive as just buying it locally. People want to buy from the counterfeiters because their products are exactly the same quality as the legitimate ones, but at far lower prices. Amazon doesn't want to pass up this revenue stream because they know people won't buy on Amazon if their prices are always higher than retail, but they have to do "something" because the owners of the trademarks, patents, and copyrights are screaming mad because they want extra money and profit to call something "genuine" and Amazon isn't helping them maintain their artificial monopoly. End result, Amazon takes a couple of sellers to court, fails to actually solve the "problem", but can tell the IP rights people that they did everything they could.
All the major Linux OSes are fully graphical, and can do everything you'd need by "clicking the icons and having it work" no tinkering involved. In fact, the excellent software repositories and built in support for almost all hardware makes things far more likely to "just work" than on Windows, and generally require less tinkering.
As for your specific software requirements, they're rare, and alternatives exist. Most users have no need for many thousands of dollars in professional software tools in addition to their OS.
I'm always a little skeptical of any of these articles that don't even include the picture of a prototype vehicle, only computer renderings. Anyone can talk like this and show a computer rendering. Getting from there to a working vehicle actually driving around and being mass produced is a rather large challenge.
We see so many press releases like this, wake me up when at least a prototype is driving around.
The good news is that Windows and Linux have exactly the same amount of support (unless you're an enterprise paying a fortune to MS on an annual basis). And the Linux UI on most distros is far more user friendly than the Windows one (don't confuse familiarity with ease of use, they aren't related)
It's viable for the vast majority of people. Either that or I've been easily using a non-viable OS for more than 15 years without noticing that it doesn't work. The fact that you personally prefer the garbage MS is pushing doesn't make it a viable alternative to Linux either.
Just because people aren't currently using it doesn't mean it wouldn't be better for them than what they're using now.
And yet my only iphone is in a drawer as it is unusably slow after only a couple years, meanwhile my much older androids are in use as various things from media player hooked up to the TV, to tablet for my daughter to play with, etc.
iPhones get slower and slower with each update, and if you don't update them all the apps stop working as they all insist on the latest OS. Meanwhile Androids get faster with each update, and the apps all keep trucking along. It helps that Android phones tend to be higher end devices with more memory, faster processors, more storage, and features that the iPhone wouldn't get for a couple years further in to the future.
What part of the manufacturing process of a high end phone adds profit margin?
High or low end phone doesn't matter for profit margin, what matters is where they set the price.
Feature and spec wise, iPhones compete with mid-range Androids, but they are priced like high end Androids, that's why they have a huge profit margin, because they set the price high for the feature set and specs.
Kudos to Apple for finding enough suckers to buy their overpriced junk, but don't confuse profit margin with quality of the good being sold. The two are not related.
So what you're saying, is that iPhones are the most over-priced of all the devices. I don't know about you, but I don't see that as a selling feature....
ALL the high end phones are Android. Every single one.
Of the mid-range phones, the iPhone7 is by far the most expensive, at about the same price as the high end Androids. but it has a fairly small market share.
All the low end phones are Android. With the exception of the 2 windows phone users and the lone blackberry guy.
End result is Android is dominating the high end market, the low end market, and the mid-range market.
That only works if your carrier gives you a decent discount for BYOD, many do not. Around here the carriers have just now started to offer BYOD plans, but they're priced such that if you paid more than about $200 for your device you'd still be better off taking the "free" phone from the carrier. (and $200 doesn't buy you much of a device around here)
Unless carriers are forced to unbundle the phones from the plans, they'll keep milking that.
I have a Note 4 at the moment, it is hard enough to hold that phone without accidentally touching the edges of the touchscreen. Between Samsung's insistence on their "edge" design, and this, there's simply no possible way to hold any of these devices anymore.
Despite my last bunch of phones all being Samsung, I've already decided my next phone won't be a Samsung, the reasons are listed below in no particular order: - "edge" design (hard to hold on to, distorts images and videos) - lack of removable battery (sure I don't change it often, but had I not been able to replace my $30 battery a couple months ago I would have needed a $1000 phone instead) - lack of SD card support (though in fairness they seem to have backtracked on that one a bit) - difficulties rooting and customizing (they've started locking things down more, and even when they don't, many root tools don't work on samsung like they do on other devices)
Not yet sure what I will get, my Note4 probably has a bunch of life left in it, but whatever I get won't likely be from Samsung.
Because we all know that there is never a case where someone tries to use last year's printer/scanner/etc/etc with this year's windows version, that's never happened....
You know how I got my scanner? My parents couldn't use it any more. Not because they didn't want to, but because there are no Windows drivers for it for the current version of windows. It works great on Linux.
Every single thumb drive you plug in to windows wastes time trying to install drivers, and even moving it to a different USB port seems to require going through the whole process all over again. On Linux you plug almost anything in to the computer and it just works, no fiddling with drivers, no waiting for it to install, just works.
If by "a few years ago" you mean 2 decades, maybe. But really Linux has been more user friendly than Windows for a very long time, with more support for hardware than Windows, and many great applications.
I stopped using Windows at home in 2000 and haven't looked back, any time I am forced to use it (eg. at work or at a friend's place) I cringe at how much harder it is to do anything on Windows than on Linux.
Agree, never host anything critical with Google, and never pay for anything that you will be upset if they discontinue.
I do use gmail, which seems pretty safe from cancellation, but even there I keep my own domain name so I can switch it at a moment's notice if Google decides to drop it like so many past products.
I pay monthly bills for all sorts of different services. I have never found any of them who were willing to move my billing date at all. I'm not sure why you think Google should do what nobody else does. As for shutting you off if you don't pay... well, yes, that would be the sensible way to handle that. Do you think they should just let you freeload forever?
Paying bills on time is part of being an adult. Learn how to do it. I'm sure nobody is losing sleep over not providing service to someone who won't pay their bills.
The reputation among owners of the vehicles is for slow repairs, long waits for parts, and an inability to even get a hold of the service centres to book appointments.
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But at this point it's gone so far that either he becomes president or you'll have riots from coast to coast.
Riots are possible the other direction too you know.
In fact, I think the political system in the USA has become so divisive, and so hostile at this point, that civil war is almost inevitable. Probably not in this election cycle, but I don't know how much more of this sort of politics the nation can withstand. Each side of every election tries harder and harder to tell everyone that if you don't vote for their candidate that you are a horrible and unpatriotic American who wants to destroy the country. People are starting to believe it. And when some parts of the population actively despise other parts of the population with the amount of vitriol that the 2 parties want, how long before it boils over?
Technically the electoral college hasn't voted Trump in. That said, the odds are extremely high that they will in fact do that, but there is actually no requirement that they do.
That however is not a saving grace of the system, in fact it's a massive flaw that needs to be fixed. Having unaccountable people who nobody knows deciding on the President of the US is not a good thing, even if they tend to vote the way their state population asked them to.
US elections baffle me. You use optical scanners? We use humans.
Our ballots are recorded with paper and pencil, and counted manually. Voting takes the average person no more than 10 minutes from the time they arrive at the polling station, until they have finished casting their ballot (yes, we actually have enough polling stations that we don't have long lines), and we have election results within an hour or two of the polls closing (short of any re-counts), and the process is transparent, and easily audited.
Why does the US continue to try to make voting as difficult and complex as possible? Is it really the end goal of the US government to prevent people from voting?
While you may be right that no hacking was involved. How would one know?
You need "proof" before you can accuse the machine, but the machines are designed specifically to avoid any such proof.
The machines are black boxes that nobody is allowed to audit, there is no paper record of what happened, and short of each and every person who voted testifying under oath as to what they chose and it not lining up with the results, there's no way to prove what actually happened. Even then, someone would accuse a percentage of those testifying under oath of lying and insist the electronic machines were right.
Without any possible way of auditing the results, these machines are really no better than a random number generator.
With paper ballots this is easy, you have observers from each party at the polling station. Each voter takes their ballot, marks it, and then places it in a ballot box. The observers make sure the ballot boxes aren't tampered with until they are unsealed after the polls close, and are counted in front of the observers. Once the votes are counted they are placed back in the boxes under the supervision of the observers, and the boxes are sealed and stored for possible later re-counts.
This leaves each elector knowing that what they wrote on the paper got in to the ballot box unaltered, and each party's observer stops anyone from tampering with the ballot boxes before they are counted, and ensures the counting is fair. Nobody knows who voted for who, but they do know that the votes that were cast are the same ones being counted.
This is how civilized countries run elections.
Then of course there are the corrupt places that eliminate critical parts of this system in the hopes of rigging elections. For example places that get rid of paper ballots, or observers, or where the person marking the ballot doesn't place it in the box themselves, or places where someone other than the person marking the ballot gets to see what's on the ballot. But only a truly corrupt regime would implement any of those policies.
And now you know why Musk wants to get to Mars....
Typical satellite ping times are to geostationary, not LEO.when you add over 20,000 miles each way to the trip, you tend to add some latency.
LEO ping times wouldn't be all that bad.
The big question that might affect the latency though will be how many downlink stations they have. If a signal has to bounce around the constellation until it reaches one downlink station in one place on the planet, that will add a lot of latency, but if they set it up so that each satellite is always (or almost always) within reach of a downlink somewhere, the latency will be minimal.
Because nobody wants to buy from the "legitimate" sellers because it's twice as expensive as just buying it locally. People want to buy from the counterfeiters because their products are exactly the same quality as the legitimate ones, but at far lower prices.
Amazon doesn't want to pass up this revenue stream because they know people won't buy on Amazon if their prices are always higher than retail, but they have to do "something" because the owners of the trademarks, patents, and copyrights are screaming mad because they want extra money and profit to call something "genuine" and Amazon isn't helping them maintain their artificial monopoly.
End result, Amazon takes a couple of sellers to court, fails to actually solve the "problem", but can tell the IP rights people that they did everything they could.
All the major Linux OSes are fully graphical, and can do everything you'd need by "clicking the icons and having it work" no tinkering involved.
In fact, the excellent software repositories and built in support for almost all hardware makes things far more likely to "just work" than on Windows, and generally require less tinkering.
As for your specific software requirements, they're rare, and alternatives exist. Most users have no need for many thousands of dollars in professional software tools in addition to their OS.
I'm always a little skeptical of any of these articles that don't even include the picture of a prototype vehicle, only computer renderings. Anyone can talk like this and show a computer rendering. Getting from there to a working vehicle actually driving around and being mass produced is a rather large challenge.
We see so many press releases like this, wake me up when at least a prototype is driving around.
The good news is that Windows and Linux have exactly the same amount of support (unless you're an enterprise paying a fortune to MS on an annual basis). And the Linux UI on most distros is far more user friendly than the Windows one (don't confuse familiarity with ease of use, they aren't related)
It's viable for the vast majority of people. Either that or I've been easily using a non-viable OS for more than 15 years without noticing that it doesn't work. The fact that you personally prefer the garbage MS is pushing doesn't make it a viable alternative to Linux either.
Just because people aren't currently using it doesn't mean it wouldn't be better for them than what they're using now.
Maybe you should check those stats...
http://www.independent.co.uk/l...
http://bgr.com/2016/10/03/ipho...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
http://www.digitaltrends.com/m...
http://www.express.co.uk/life-...
And yet my only iphone is in a drawer as it is unusably slow after only a couple years, meanwhile my much older androids are in use as various things from media player hooked up to the TV, to tablet for my daughter to play with, etc.
iPhones get slower and slower with each update, and if you don't update them all the apps stop working as they all insist on the latest OS. Meanwhile Androids get faster with each update, and the apps all keep trucking along. It helps that Android phones tend to be higher end devices with more memory, faster processors, more storage, and features that the iPhone wouldn't get for a couple years further in to the future.
What part of the manufacturing process of a high end phone adds profit margin?
High or low end phone doesn't matter for profit margin, what matters is where they set the price.
Feature and spec wise, iPhones compete with mid-range Androids, but they are priced like high end Androids, that's why they have a huge profit margin, because they set the price high for the feature set and specs.
Kudos to Apple for finding enough suckers to buy their overpriced junk, but don't confuse profit margin with quality of the good being sold. The two are not related.
Apple has about 12% of the market and is number two behind Samsung. Apple takes about 70% of the profit.
So what you're saying, is that iPhones are the most over-priced of all the devices. I don't know about you, but I don't see that as a selling feature....
This is exactly it.
ALL the high end phones are Android. Every single one.
Of the mid-range phones, the iPhone7 is by far the most expensive, at about the same price as the high end Androids. but it has a fairly small market share.
All the low end phones are Android. With the exception of the 2 windows phone users and the lone blackberry guy.
End result is Android is dominating the high end market, the low end market, and the mid-range market.
That only works if your carrier gives you a decent discount for BYOD, many do not. Around here the carriers have just now started to offer BYOD plans, but they're priced such that if you paid more than about $200 for your device you'd still be better off taking the "free" phone from the carrier. (and $200 doesn't buy you much of a device around here)
Unless carriers are forced to unbundle the phones from the plans, they'll keep milking that.
I have a Note 4 at the moment, it is hard enough to hold that phone without accidentally touching the edges of the touchscreen. Between Samsung's insistence on their "edge" design, and this, there's simply no possible way to hold any of these devices anymore.
Despite my last bunch of phones all being Samsung, I've already decided my next phone won't be a Samsung, the reasons are listed below in no particular order:
- "edge" design (hard to hold on to, distorts images and videos)
- lack of removable battery (sure I don't change it often, but had I not been able to replace my $30 battery a couple months ago I would have needed a $1000 phone instead)
- lack of SD card support (though in fairness they seem to have backtracked on that one a bit)
- difficulties rooting and customizing (they've started locking things down more, and even when they don't, many root tools don't work on samsung like they do on other devices)
Not yet sure what I will get, my Note4 probably has a bunch of life left in it, but whatever I get won't likely be from Samsung.
Because we all know that there is never a case where someone tries to use last year's printer/scanner/etc/etc with this year's windows version, that's never happened....
You know how I got my scanner? My parents couldn't use it any more. Not because they didn't want to, but because there are no Windows drivers for it for the current version of windows. It works great on Linux.
Every single thumb drive you plug in to windows wastes time trying to install drivers, and even moving it to a different USB port seems to require going through the whole process all over again. On Linux you plug almost anything in to the computer and it just works, no fiddling with drivers, no waiting for it to install, just works.
Someone who uses Linux exclusively at home isn't in a position to judge how easy it is to use?
Or someone who uses Windows at work and Linux at home isn't in a position to compare the two?
If by "a few years ago" you mean 2 decades, maybe. But really Linux has been more user friendly than Windows for a very long time, with more support for hardware than Windows, and many great applications.
I stopped using Windows at home in 2000 and haven't looked back, any time I am forced to use it (eg. at work or at a friend's place) I cringe at how much harder it is to do anything on Windows than on Linux.
Agree, never host anything critical with Google, and never pay for anything that you will be upset if they discontinue.
I do use gmail, which seems pretty safe from cancellation, but even there I keep my own domain name so I can switch it at a moment's notice if Google decides to drop it like so many past products.
I pay monthly bills for all sorts of different services. I have never found any of them who were willing to move my billing date at all. I'm not sure why you think Google should do what nobody else does. As for shutting you off if you don't pay... well, yes, that would be the sensible way to handle that. Do you think they should just let you freeload forever?
Paying bills on time is part of being an adult. Learn how to do it. I'm sure nobody is losing sleep over not providing service to someone who won't pay their bills.
pay attention to the forums.
The reputation among owners of the vehicles is for slow repairs, long waits for parts, and an inability to even get a hold of the service centres to book appointments.