I think this ambiguity is the real problem with the term. In countries where it is protected, the term 'Engineer' carries a lot of weight, whereas in countries where it is not, it really just depends on who has historically called themselves an engineer. I've noticed in the UK that metal bashers are traditionally called engineers, and after the whole Thatcher destroy the workers thing, anyone who is an engineer is deemed to be part of the 'old' economic order and generally marginalised. This unfortunately has included lots of really good degree qualified engineers.
Since moving here I have picked up the term developer (even though I have an electronics engineering degree) because everyone thinks of Google/Apple when I say 'developer', rather than some guy in a shed in Stains cutting chassis numbers out of stolen vehicles.
Today's fundamental problems are, remarkably, almost exactly the same as they have been for recorded history. People are greedy, easily indoctrinated with irrational ideas, and dishonest. What is quite amazing though is that technology has continued to deliver an incredible capacity for abundance that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.
My observation is that we created a reasonably effective economic system for when labour was the limiting factor. The idea that you must work to eat is fine when there is only enough food and basic goods available if everyone in the village is helping to tend the fields. It makes sense that the guy who won't work is the first to miss out if there is not enough. However the shiny iPhone in your hand and gold ring on your finger would suggest we have really moved on from this. There is a huge surplus of productive capacity around, and much of the stuff we consume is generally unnecessary. Saying to someone that if they can't do a pointless monkey dance for the people who happen to own all the food they will have to go hungry while the food gets left in the field is, I believe, one day going to seem as barbaric as the labour conditions in Dickensian England.
Our present system has served us well, but is becoming a victim of its own success. We need to deal with the entrenched puritan work ethic in society and start to move towards a system that can manage the massive growth in capital productivity that is going to occur over the next few decades. If we don't the sad reality is that we are likely to put people under tremendous and pointless suffering for no reason. The great recession was the start of that, and it will only get worse unless we recognise that we do not have a pre 1950s labour limited economy anymore.
Absolutely. I worked for a small blueberry farmer who was making sorting equipment back in the early 2000s. It didn't take him long before he was making more from the machines (they were much more basic than a picking machine) than his entire blueberry farm. There is big money in reducing the need for seasonal labour and $250k is peanuts.
As an aside, one of the things that was common on the blueberry farms was to use a tree shaker to harvest the lower grade fruit. It was only the really high quality fruit that was hand picked. I never enquired as to what the main benefits of this were (whether quality or yield?), but the tree shakers seemed to work pretty well at getting everything out of the tree and weren't exactly complex pieces of equipment. I wonder if that puts more constraints on the economics of such a project that make it less attractive for agricultural equipment manufacturers.
What would be wrong with restricting a driverless taxi service to only certain roadways that have been configured to support them (if required)? You could just start with suitable inner city CBD areas, and build out the capacity with a combination of roadway improvements and upgrades to the car so that it can service larger and larger areas. Similarly, the first automated truck systems could just travel between terminals at the ends of motorways (which are already well formed). Human truck drivers could pick up the trailers at these points and complete the local deliveries.
But sure, a driverless car that you can dump on a country road in Scotland and expect to find its way into central London is a long way off. However, I don't think we need that to get the bulk of the benefits from the technology.
Personally I wouldn't be surprised if what happens is that driverless vehicles cut automotive related injuries so much that people become outraged that governments are not upgrading more roads to support them. Think of the children and all that.
I would characterise it differently. One is trying to engineer out all the risk, while the other is going to shape the perception of the risk in the market.
The reality is that no matter how long Google spends trying to make their cars safer and safer (and apparently it is already significantly safer than a human) one day their car is going to have a serious accident. Maybe it is not even the car's fault, and some grandma has a heart attack and smashes into the side of it and dies. It doesn't matter, at that point the thing that will decide whether there is a massive backlash against the cars or not is going to be who can spin the story the best. On one side you'll have professional drivers, non-driverless car makers and a sensationalist media who will jump all over the story, showing pictures of granny's sobbing family and Sergey climbing out of his private jet. On the other side Google will probably wheel out some geeks with terrible communication skills trying to explain the numbers. They will lose, set back the acceptance of the cars for a decade, and not understand at all why.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, has learnt a lot about how much of the non-tech world is both ignorant and irrational (remember the whole battery fire thing). What he will be betting on is that by the time his car has a minor accident he will be able to turn up on TV and say how Tesla drivers have used the autopilot for whatever millions of miles and this is the first incident. He will probably have a few canned stories lined up about Sarah the housewife who's toddler was saved from being involved in an accident by the feature. He will fight the PR battle and eventually the media will move onto the next story and subsequent driverless car crashes will get less and less airtime. This will pave the way for the widespread adoption of them. Ultimately the biggest beneficiary of this will probably be Google as it will make it easier for them to bring their undoubtedly far superior technology into the real world. Unless, of course, Musk has gambled too big, and the cars kill a bunch of people due to a software bug.
Driverless cars are going to be hugely disruptive to a large number of industry. The first Uber/Lyft like company to get them going will be able to undercut every taxi service in the entire developed world. We are talking a billion dollar industry there. They will likely be able to gain a significant share of the existing public transit spend in almost every city in the world - even those with good public transit infrastructure - another billion dollar industry. For many individuals it will be more attractive to spend the considerable amounts of money they currently spend owning a private car on an automated taxi service, which is another billion dollar industry.
The first trucking company to use driverless cars will be able to run trucks more often, for cheaper, undercutting everyone else. This is again a billion dollar industry. Eventually companies like Amazon and Walmart will have vending machine vans that circulate around an area and come to your door with milk and bread faster than you can walk down to your local store. This will change the nature of bricks and mortar retail again. That is another billion dollar industry.
A fleet of driverless taxi services would potentially make the economics of electric cars look unbeatable. The high load factor of taxis means that you can afford to pay a lot more in capital costs in exchange for massively reduced operating costs. Automated taxis could also manage their own charging, and with apps that pre-plan journeys the car sent to you would be able to ensure it had enough charge to get you to your destination, eliminating the main problem with electric cars right now. The system could probably be built with small (cheap) onboard batteries and a limited number of swapping stations throughout a city. This could massively undercut both gas cars and private vehicle ownership without any further reductions in battery prices. Now you are talking about a trillion dollar industry.
There is no doubt that driverless cars are a challenging technology to develop. It will be extremely difficult to make them as reliable and safe as we would all like them to be. But in the end, as long as they are, say, an order of magnitude safer than human drivers, the massive economic benefits (i.e. potential profits) will ensure that they are put on the roads. When there is this level of money to be made, capitalism will find a way.
If the best argument for keeping car dealers is that they operate as a local community tax then it's time to get the window breakers out and return us to full employment.
Seriously, people just have a huge appetite for consuming junk. We've created a whole economic/social/political system predicated on consuming more and more junk. It keeps people under control as they slave away doing pointless stuff to get other pointless stuff. I don't see how you can break that system right now without risking massive social stability issues.
"But the miners still get $4 per kilo [before the law they got $7]. That’s because there are only a few trading houses in the provincial capital, Bukavu, due to the limited supply of tagged minerals and delays in providing government licences to buy them, miners and community leaders said. The houses fix the price, they added."
Okay so in addition to the government's 'inability' to certify more mines, they are also turning a blind eye to price cartels that are using the situation to squeeze miners? I have very little doubt it is corruption all the way to the top with the whole situation. My guess is that everyone they interviewed was either getting their cut, and so had a vested interest in 'blaming Obama', or too uneducated to have a clue who Obama even is and are just saying what they've heard.
What a tragic situation for what should be a wealthy country.
An average age of 30 would suggest a pretty robust distribution of workers up to 40 as well. Those people would have gotten degrees in the late 1990s. I did my EE degree in the early 2000s and back then CS was still considered a bit of a specialist degree with uncertain career prospects compared to engineering. Of course since then the industry has absolutely exploded.
Could the reason for the lack of above 40 workers be that there are simply far less CS people in that age group? I mean, going forward to 50 year olds and you are talking about the very few people who thought studying these new personal computer things in the 1980s was the way to go. If you were that forward thinking you are probably retired in Belize by now or in a cushy management position at Microsoft.
Sure but electric cars have one big card that they haven't really played yet - low running costs. As battery prices fall and we move more into normal-people cars (as opposed to wealthy first movers) this will become more and more apparent. Imagine now if you could get a Leaf for the same price as a petrol equivalent. For many people the fact that they could do all their normal commuting and have an extra $30-40 in their pockets each week to spend on something else will be extremely compelling. Add to this not having to do oil changes, and a car that could potentially last you for a decade without needing any more than tyre changes and you will have a lot of people interested.
As others have said, electric cars won't be for everyone, but if we reach a tipping point where they are for, say 1/3 of people, that will be a massive disruption to the industry. I think that point can arrive long before they have range/refuelling equivalence with petrol technology.
No you only do the not looking for patents thing if you are a startup. The key difference is that if your startup fails then nobody cares, and if your startup succeeds and you are challenged by a patent holder you can just negotiate royalties without them being able to threaten triple damages on you. If you are Apple you do due diligence and freedom to operate processes on any new tech area you operate in because you aren't going to get away with flying under the radar. They probably have in house lawyers who trawl patents checking for this stuff.
More than likely Apple did a very thorough assessment of the patent and concluded that they did not think they were infringing it. They have now been found to be infringing it so of course the plaintiff is going to try to get wilful damages on the basis that they knew about the patent. Somebody at Apple stuffed up in their assessment and it looks like they should have just negotiated a license early on, but on the other hand you can't just go around paying off everyone who you think might be able to win a jury trial.
Electric technology is not hard. Infact, it is ridiculously easy compared to designing a low-emissions, direct injected, variable timing, variable geometry turbocharged combustion engine that needs to do 300,000 kms in a range of harsh conditions. Even Tesla uses a pretty compromised powertrain design (oversized induction motor without multi-speed gearbox) because is just doesn't really matter at this point (plus they get the ludicrous mode thing as a byproduct).
The only issue electric cars have now is the cost of the batteries. And the only way this will be solved is through building more and better battery factories.
I imagine this is why existing car companies are so reluctant to jump into the electric market. All of them will realise that at some point battery prices will cause them to have to write off billions in sunk investment costs, but what CEO would want to spend money to bring that day forward.
As with almost all patents, most definitely not the people who actually came up with the invention.
Engineers should form some kind of intellectual property defence league and refuse to sign employment contracts that blanket assign all inventions to an employer for a wine and cheese basket and day off. Of course employers deserve some level of ownership for creating the environment in which the innovations could occur, but without the engineers they would have neither the environment or the ideas.
Intellectual property is increasingly becoming one of the most valuable assets in our economy, yet most engineers trade their ideas for an hourly wage that is barely enough to buy a place to live in most cities now.
This is great. I sadly missed out (was too young) for the whole Y2K money fest, but I saw the new BMWs and expensive vacations that many of my older computing peers undertook as a result of the exorbitant amounts of money they charged to review old source code. I also knew enough then to realise that about 95% of what 'experts' were saying on the TV was nothing more than fear mongering.
Anyway with this cyber-warfare stuff kicking in there should be no shortage of cushy contract work for decades to come. The military industrial complex has arrived, and it's ability to convert fear into profit is without end.
Sure bartering has existed forever. But money is not bartering - it is a quite different thing entirely. Money is just a man-made asset that we arbitrarily produce in quantities that are meant to maintain its price relative to a bunch of real assets (the inflation measurement). It is quite incredible that we can create real material prosperity or real starvation based on how much of this arbitrary asset we produce. It really does make this current 'great recession' just seem like the height of human communal stupidity. We did not run out of all the labour and resources that perpetuated the boom years. Yet now we can barely build basic infrastructure despite having high unemployment, exceptional technological abilities, and low commodity prices.
The root cause of all this is that neo-liberal economics put the control of the production of money into the hands of the financial system. The obvious outcome of this was that the financial system has been trying to create asset bubbles anywhere it possibly can since this happened. Now, in defence of neo-liberal economics, it is not clear that the previous scheme, where you just had some guy with an arts degree who was good at winning elections, controlling the money supply was much better. What is clear is that we need a better scheme of allocating resources in the economy than pieces of paper who's value only exists in our minds. That probably doesn't look like the star-trek economy, but surely what we have now is not the best we can do.
The trouble is that this option is not there because Apple has stripped out the bill of material costs so they can altruistically deliver people like you a cheaper phone. It is unequivocally a marketing strategy to try to raise average sale prices. Remember, prices have been falling now with inflation for over 8 years, which is not ideal. This is one of the problems with having a single product strategy - it is very hard to raise average prices without people noticing. An alternative is what you see in the TV market, where the new tech comes in very expensive, and eventually falls down the price stack. This allows you to keep pushing average prices up each year as it is harder for people to compare an equivalent product between years.
I do agree with what is being said in this article though. In my view Apple have stretched it too far this time. However, I'm not the average buyer (tech savvy) and most buyers (such as my parents) wouldn't have a clue whether 16GB is 'enough'. I think what is sad is that you can see the beginnings of MBA creep occurring at Apple. Of course that is inevitable giving their oracle is dead, but it does mean they are likely to become about as exciting as Microsoft. I do miss the original Jobs product launches. Sure he was a bully and stole lots of people's ideas, but he certainly wasn't boring.
Who was holding the "gun" to the head of the Uber drivers and demanding that they drive for Uber?
Nobody specifically, but this is a tragedy of the commons situation. If all employers are free to not have to provide any sorts of labour protections to their workers, then competitive forces (and/or greed) will ensure none of them do. That means we can all look forward to a return to six day work weeks, little health and safety (your own responsibility as a contractor), and people being valued like performing animals, discarded the day they go lame. So basically what it was like for workers around the 1900s.
Society needs agreed government protections such as employee rights to prevent absurd and unproductive situations from occurring. Sure some of those rights might have gone too far today, but Uber isn't fighting to knock a few things back - they want to get around the whole employee thing altogether. Good on the courts for stamping that out.
Feel for you. If you were doing lots of office admin stuff anyway, have you considered if you could get into an office manager role? There is always demand for versatile people who can act as the glue to keep an office running, and if you can also bring IT skills that just makes you more employable. I think tech people can sometimes become so fixated on hard skill roles that they don't value the soft skills they might have developed along the way.
One thing I have learnt from all my BA friends who now work in senior admin and marketing jobs, is you just have to be confident. Most people don't have a clear concept of what each role really means in today's modern economy, and they are mostly looking for versatile people who are a good cultural fit - that likeable guy who you throw a problem at and he just goes and solves it for you. If you come across as that person, which it sounds like part of what you were doing, then you'll fit perfectly into the new economy.
Great. I now know that a company called ‘security innovations’ is basically a front for a bunch of marketing and PR muppets who will sell you some snake oil attached to whatever is the latest media feeding frenzy using fear and misinformation.
I could go down to my local motorway junction with a pocket full of laser pointers right now and cause a whole lot of human-driven cars to have to slow down and enter a safety mode. I'm pretty sure I would get arrested for doing this, and I doubt the outcome for someone doing this to driverless cars will be any different. No doubt it will be drones with lasers next week.
Fair point, but the problem is their fees negate most of any benefit they bring, and we don't know what risks they took to get that 21%. An S&P 500 index fund would have returned around 12% last year. The management fee came to 6% so they are only 2% up on index tracking. Sure 2% is a lot on that amount of money, but any sensible investor can do better than an S&P 500 index fund if they are prepared to take more risk. Putting a portion of the funds into tech stocks on the assumption that the tech bubble will last another year would do have achieved that, as an example.
For this to be beneficial to the fund owners, the fund managers would have needed to contribute some sort of 'secret sauce' that allowed them to obtain an 8% risk premium for less than a 2% risk premium. Otherwise they are just gambling with their clients money and keeping the bulk of the returns for themselves, which I imagine is exactly what they are doing.
That is just crazy. These are not high-risk/return investments funds. Just load up on a diversified bluechip portfolio, and make sure you follow all the other sheep so that you can't be singled out for getting something wrong.
The annual fund manager convention must just be putting up pictures of regular people and laughing profusely.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation: Toyota is woefully behind in autonomous car development, and rather worried about it.
The FUD begins.
I think this ambiguity is the real problem with the term. In countries where it is protected, the term 'Engineer' carries a lot of weight, whereas in countries where it is not, it really just depends on who has historically called themselves an engineer. I've noticed in the UK that metal bashers are traditionally called engineers, and after the whole Thatcher destroy the workers thing, anyone who is an engineer is deemed to be part of the 'old' economic order and generally marginalised. This unfortunately has included lots of really good degree qualified engineers.
Since moving here I have picked up the term developer (even though I have an electronics engineering degree) because everyone thinks of Google/Apple when I say 'developer', rather than some guy in a shed in Stains cutting chassis numbers out of stolen vehicles.
Today's fundamental problems are, remarkably, almost exactly the same as they have been for recorded history. People are greedy, easily indoctrinated with irrational ideas, and dishonest. What is quite amazing though is that technology has continued to deliver an incredible capacity for abundance that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.
My observation is that we created a reasonably effective economic system for when labour was the limiting factor. The idea that you must work to eat is fine when there is only enough food and basic goods available if everyone in the village is helping to tend the fields. It makes sense that the guy who won't work is the first to miss out if there is not enough. However the shiny iPhone in your hand and gold ring on your finger would suggest we have really moved on from this. There is a huge surplus of productive capacity around, and much of the stuff we consume is generally unnecessary. Saying to someone that if they can't do a pointless monkey dance for the people who happen to own all the food they will have to go hungry while the food gets left in the field is, I believe, one day going to seem as barbaric as the labour conditions in Dickensian England.
Our present system has served us well, but is becoming a victim of its own success. We need to deal with the entrenched puritan work ethic in society and start to move towards a system that can manage the massive growth in capital productivity that is going to occur over the next few decades. If we don't the sad reality is that we are likely to put people under tremendous and pointless suffering for no reason. The great recession was the start of that, and it will only get worse unless we recognise that we do not have a pre 1950s labour limited economy anymore.
Lessig might have actually had a chance, can't have the possibility of messing up the Royal Coronation underway!
Same reason Biden is not running.
I thought it was Jeb's turn this time? I guess Obama messed the schedule up.
Absolutely. I worked for a small blueberry farmer who was making sorting equipment back in the early 2000s. It didn't take him long before he was making more from the machines (they were much more basic than a picking machine) than his entire blueberry farm. There is big money in reducing the need for seasonal labour and $250k is peanuts.
As an aside, one of the things that was common on the blueberry farms was to use a tree shaker to harvest the lower grade fruit. It was only the really high quality fruit that was hand picked. I never enquired as to what the main benefits of this were (whether quality or yield?), but the tree shakers seemed to work pretty well at getting everything out of the tree and weren't exactly complex pieces of equipment. I wonder if that puts more constraints on the economics of such a project that make it less attractive for agricultural equipment manufacturers.
What would be wrong with restricting a driverless taxi service to only certain roadways that have been configured to support them (if required)? You could just start with suitable inner city CBD areas, and build out the capacity with a combination of roadway improvements and upgrades to the car so that it can service larger and larger areas. Similarly, the first automated truck systems could just travel between terminals at the ends of motorways (which are already well formed). Human truck drivers could pick up the trailers at these points and complete the local deliveries.
But sure, a driverless car that you can dump on a country road in Scotland and expect to find its way into central London is a long way off. However, I don't think we need that to get the bulk of the benefits from the technology.
Personally I wouldn't be surprised if what happens is that driverless vehicles cut automotive related injuries so much that people become outraged that governments are not upgrading more roads to support them. Think of the children and all that.
I would characterise it differently. One is trying to engineer out all the risk, while the other is going to shape the perception of the risk in the market.
The reality is that no matter how long Google spends trying to make their cars safer and safer (and apparently it is already significantly safer than a human) one day their car is going to have a serious accident. Maybe it is not even the car's fault, and some grandma has a heart attack and smashes into the side of it and dies. It doesn't matter, at that point the thing that will decide whether there is a massive backlash against the cars or not is going to be who can spin the story the best. On one side you'll have professional drivers, non-driverless car makers and a sensationalist media who will jump all over the story, showing pictures of granny's sobbing family and Sergey climbing out of his private jet. On the other side Google will probably wheel out some geeks with terrible communication skills trying to explain the numbers. They will lose, set back the acceptance of the cars for a decade, and not understand at all why.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, has learnt a lot about how much of the non-tech world is both ignorant and irrational (remember the whole battery fire thing). What he will be betting on is that by the time his car has a minor accident he will be able to turn up on TV and say how Tesla drivers have used the autopilot for whatever millions of miles and this is the first incident. He will probably have a few canned stories lined up about Sarah the housewife who's toddler was saved from being involved in an accident by the feature. He will fight the PR battle and eventually the media will move onto the next story and subsequent driverless car crashes will get less and less airtime. This will pave the way for the widespread adoption of them. Ultimately the biggest beneficiary of this will probably be Google as it will make it easier for them to bring their undoubtedly far superior technology into the real world. Unless, of course, Musk has gambled too big, and the cars kill a bunch of people due to a software bug.
Driverless cars are going to be hugely disruptive to a large number of industry. The first Uber/Lyft like company to get them going will be able to undercut every taxi service in the entire developed world. We are talking a billion dollar industry there. They will likely be able to gain a significant share of the existing public transit spend in almost every city in the world - even those with good public transit infrastructure - another billion dollar industry. For many individuals it will be more attractive to spend the considerable amounts of money they currently spend owning a private car on an automated taxi service, which is another billion dollar industry.
The first trucking company to use driverless cars will be able to run trucks more often, for cheaper, undercutting everyone else. This is again a billion dollar industry. Eventually companies like Amazon and Walmart will have vending machine vans that circulate around an area and come to your door with milk and bread faster than you can walk down to your local store. This will change the nature of bricks and mortar retail again. That is another billion dollar industry.
A fleet of driverless taxi services would potentially make the economics of electric cars look unbeatable. The high load factor of taxis means that you can afford to pay a lot more in capital costs in exchange for massively reduced operating costs. Automated taxis could also manage their own charging, and with apps that pre-plan journeys the car sent to you would be able to ensure it had enough charge to get you to your destination, eliminating the main problem with electric cars right now. The system could probably be built with small (cheap) onboard batteries and a limited number of swapping stations throughout a city. This could massively undercut both gas cars and private vehicle ownership without any further reductions in battery prices. Now you are talking about a trillion dollar industry.
There is no doubt that driverless cars are a challenging technology to develop. It will be extremely difficult to make them as reliable and safe as we would all like them to be. But in the end, as long as they are, say, an order of magnitude safer than human drivers, the massive economic benefits (i.e. potential profits) will ensure that they are put on the roads. When there is this level of money to be made, capitalism will find a way.
If the best argument for keeping car dealers is that they operate as a local community tax then it's time to get the window breakers out and return us to full employment.
Seriously, people just have a huge appetite for consuming junk. We've created a whole economic/social/political system predicated on consuming more and more junk. It keeps people under control as they slave away doing pointless stuff to get other pointless stuff. I don't see how you can break that system right now without risking massive social stability issues.
Yeah, worse than that:
"But the miners still get $4 per kilo [before the law they got $7]. That’s because there are only a few trading houses in the provincial capital, Bukavu, due to the limited supply of tagged minerals and delays in providing government licences to buy them, miners and community leaders said. The houses fix the price, they added."
Okay so in addition to the government's 'inability' to certify more mines, they are also turning a blind eye to price cartels that are using the situation to squeeze miners? I have very little doubt it is corruption all the way to the top with the whole situation. My guess is that everyone they interviewed was either getting their cut, and so had a vested interest in 'blaming Obama', or too uneducated to have a clue who Obama even is and are just saying what they've heard.
What a tragic situation for what should be a wealthy country.
An average age of 30 would suggest a pretty robust distribution of workers up to 40 as well. Those people would have gotten degrees in the late 1990s. I did my EE degree in the early 2000s and back then CS was still considered a bit of a specialist degree with uncertain career prospects compared to engineering. Of course since then the industry has absolutely exploded.
Could the reason for the lack of above 40 workers be that there are simply far less CS people in that age group? I mean, going forward to 50 year olds and you are talking about the very few people who thought studying these new personal computer things in the 1980s was the way to go. If you were that forward thinking you are probably retired in Belize by now or in a cushy management position at Microsoft.
Sure but electric cars have one big card that they haven't really played yet - low running costs. As battery prices fall and we move more into normal-people cars (as opposed to wealthy first movers) this will become more and more apparent. Imagine now if you could get a Leaf for the same price as a petrol equivalent. For many people the fact that they could do all their normal commuting and have an extra $30-40 in their pockets each week to spend on something else will be extremely compelling. Add to this not having to do oil changes, and a car that could potentially last you for a decade without needing any more than tyre changes and you will have a lot of people interested.
As others have said, electric cars won't be for everyone, but if we reach a tipping point where they are for, say 1/3 of people, that will be a massive disruption to the industry. I think that point can arrive long before they have range/refuelling equivalence with petrol technology.
No you only do the not looking for patents thing if you are a startup. The key difference is that if your startup fails then nobody cares, and if your startup succeeds and you are challenged by a patent holder you can just negotiate royalties without them being able to threaten triple damages on you. If you are Apple you do due diligence and freedom to operate processes on any new tech area you operate in because you aren't going to get away with flying under the radar. They probably have in house lawyers who trawl patents checking for this stuff.
More than likely Apple did a very thorough assessment of the patent and concluded that they did not think they were infringing it. They have now been found to be infringing it so of course the plaintiff is going to try to get wilful damages on the basis that they knew about the patent. Somebody at Apple stuffed up in their assessment and it looks like they should have just negotiated a license early on, but on the other hand you can't just go around paying off everyone who you think might be able to win a jury trial.
Electric technology is not hard. Infact, it is ridiculously easy compared to designing a low-emissions, direct injected, variable timing, variable geometry turbocharged combustion engine that needs to do 300,000 kms in a range of harsh conditions. Even Tesla uses a pretty compromised powertrain design (oversized induction motor without multi-speed gearbox) because is just doesn't really matter at this point (plus they get the ludicrous mode thing as a byproduct).
The only issue electric cars have now is the cost of the batteries. And the only way this will be solved is through building more and better battery factories.
I imagine this is why existing car companies are so reluctant to jump into the electric market. All of them will realise that at some point battery prices will cause them to have to write off billions in sunk investment costs, but what CEO would want to spend money to bring that day forward.
As with almost all patents, most definitely not the people who actually came up with the invention.
Engineers should form some kind of intellectual property defence league and refuse to sign employment contracts that blanket assign all inventions to an employer for a wine and cheese basket and day off. Of course employers deserve some level of ownership for creating the environment in which the innovations could occur, but without the engineers they would have neither the environment or the ideas.
Intellectual property is increasingly becoming one of the most valuable assets in our economy, yet most engineers trade their ideas for an hourly wage that is barely enough to buy a place to live in most cities now.
This is great. I sadly missed out (was too young) for the whole Y2K money fest, but I saw the new BMWs and expensive vacations that many of my older computing peers undertook as a result of the exorbitant amounts of money they charged to review old source code. I also knew enough then to realise that about 95% of what 'experts' were saying on the TV was nothing more than fear mongering.
Anyway with this cyber-warfare stuff kicking in there should be no shortage of cushy contract work for decades to come. The military industrial complex has arrived, and it's ability to convert fear into profit is without end.
Sure bartering has existed forever. But money is not bartering - it is a quite different thing entirely. Money is just a man-made asset that we arbitrarily produce in quantities that are meant to maintain its price relative to a bunch of real assets (the inflation measurement). It is quite incredible that we can create real material prosperity or real starvation based on how much of this arbitrary asset we produce. It really does make this current 'great recession' just seem like the height of human communal stupidity. We did not run out of all the labour and resources that perpetuated the boom years. Yet now we can barely build basic infrastructure despite having high unemployment, exceptional technological abilities, and low commodity prices.
The root cause of all this is that neo-liberal economics put the control of the production of money into the hands of the financial system. The obvious outcome of this was that the financial system has been trying to create asset bubbles anywhere it possibly can since this happened. Now, in defence of neo-liberal economics, it is not clear that the previous scheme, where you just had some guy with an arts degree who was good at winning elections, controlling the money supply was much better. What is clear is that we need a better scheme of allocating resources in the economy than pieces of paper who's value only exists in our minds. That probably doesn't look like the star-trek economy, but surely what we have now is not the best we can do.
The trouble is that this option is not there because Apple has stripped out the bill of material costs so they can altruistically deliver people like you a cheaper phone. It is unequivocally a marketing strategy to try to raise average sale prices. Remember, prices have been falling now with inflation for over 8 years, which is not ideal. This is one of the problems with having a single product strategy - it is very hard to raise average prices without people noticing. An alternative is what you see in the TV market, where the new tech comes in very expensive, and eventually falls down the price stack. This allows you to keep pushing average prices up each year as it is harder for people to compare an equivalent product between years.
I do agree with what is being said in this article though. In my view Apple have stretched it too far this time. However, I'm not the average buyer (tech savvy) and most buyers (such as my parents) wouldn't have a clue whether 16GB is 'enough'. I think what is sad is that you can see the beginnings of MBA creep occurring at Apple. Of course that is inevitable giving their oracle is dead, but it does mean they are likely to become about as exciting as Microsoft. I do miss the original Jobs product launches. Sure he was a bully and stole lots of people's ideas, but he certainly wasn't boring.
Who was holding the "gun" to the head of the Uber drivers and demanding that they drive for Uber?
Nobody specifically, but this is a tragedy of the commons situation. If all employers are free to not have to provide any sorts of labour protections to their workers, then competitive forces (and/or greed) will ensure none of them do. That means we can all look forward to a return to six day work weeks, little health and safety (your own responsibility as a contractor), and people being valued like performing animals, discarded the day they go lame. So basically what it was like for workers around the 1900s.
Society needs agreed government protections such as employee rights to prevent absurd and unproductive situations from occurring. Sure some of those rights might have gone too far today, but Uber isn't fighting to knock a few things back - they want to get around the whole employee thing altogether. Good on the courts for stamping that out.
Feel for you. If you were doing lots of office admin stuff anyway, have you considered if you could get into an office manager role? There is always demand for versatile people who can act as the glue to keep an office running, and if you can also bring IT skills that just makes you more employable. I think tech people can sometimes become so fixated on hard skill roles that they don't value the soft skills they might have developed along the way.
One thing I have learnt from all my BA friends who now work in senior admin and marketing jobs, is you just have to be confident. Most people don't have a clear concept of what each role really means in today's modern economy, and they are mostly looking for versatile people who are a good cultural fit - that likeable guy who you throw a problem at and he just goes and solves it for you. If you come across as that person, which it sounds like part of what you were doing, then you'll fit perfectly into the new economy.
Great. I now know that a company called ‘security innovations’ is basically a front for a bunch of marketing and PR muppets who will sell you some snake oil attached to whatever is the latest media feeding frenzy using fear and misinformation.
I could go down to my local motorway junction with a pocket full of laser pointers right now and cause a whole lot of human-driven cars to have to slow down and enter a safety mode. I'm pretty sure I would get arrested for doing this, and I doubt the outcome for someone doing this to driverless cars will be any different. No doubt it will be drones with lasers next week.
The Velib system in Paris. V+ stations at the top of hills give you 15mins extra free cycle time if you dock the bike at one.
Fair point, but the problem is their fees negate most of any benefit they bring, and we don't know what risks they took to get that 21%. An S&P 500 index fund would have returned around 12% last year. The management fee came to 6% so they are only 2% up on index tracking. Sure 2% is a lot on that amount of money, but any sensible investor can do better than an S&P 500 index fund if they are prepared to take more risk. Putting a portion of the funds into tech stocks on the assumption that the tech bubble will last another year would do have achieved that, as an example.
For this to be beneficial to the fund owners, the fund managers would have needed to contribute some sort of 'secret sauce' that allowed them to obtain an 8% risk premium for less than a 2% risk premium. Otherwise they are just gambling with their clients money and keeping the bulk of the returns for themselves, which I imagine is exactly what they are doing.
That is just crazy. These are not high-risk/return investments funds. Just load up on a diversified bluechip portfolio, and make sure you follow all the other sheep so that you can't be singled out for getting something wrong.
The annual fund manager convention must just be putting up pictures of regular people and laughing profusely.