It's much much worse than that. If you're slightly above middle class wealthy (more than a few million) you don't pay any tax, and if you're completely immoral you can even put yourself into an income position where you, your spouse or children are getting handouts from the state (e.g. education grants, child tax credits). I'm serious look into it a bit.
I can't find the link now but the investment banks have a great scheme where they essentially loan you money against the capital gains on your shares so you never have to cash them in and pay the CGT. When you die they use an estate tax loophole to pay themselves back so nobody has to pay any tax. Also you might have heard about freeports in places like Luxemborg airport where the rich literally fly in with assets and trade them with other rich people using a historic loop hole around the tax jurisdiction of the sale.
In general I applaud this sort of restraint, but I hope it is the full story. As anyone who has contracted knows, you are a knob to accept a salary if you can avoid it. Having the money come out in dividends, capital gains or trust/company income basically takes you from a punitive tax regime into one where you can manage tax in remarkably creative ways.
For example if you want to run a race car, you can quite happily claim back the costs of racing as an advertising expense so long as you put a logo on your car. In some countries you can even run the racing company at a loss which can be offset against other income streams. Want an overseas holiday? There are rules around a business meeting at the start and end that can make the majority of a trip deductible. Even easier if it is to just attend a professional conference that just happens to be in a tropical holiday destination (hint hint). Personally I found this sort of slight of hand quite disgusting, but many of these issues are very hard to define clearly in legislation.
Anyway, point is this is a good move, but may not tell the full story. Lets hope it does.
This is basically crowd sourced media in general. The great achievement of web 2.0 is that PR companies etc can now pretend to be 'the people' while feeding us with the messages they want to broadcast. I find this very dishonest. At least when Scarlett Johansson tells me I should buy a soda stream on TV I'm not sitting there wondering if she is actually an expert in carbonated beverages and should be trusted.
For a master class in how ridiculous it is, just go read any comment page on the Guardian associated with an article about Russia. What scares me is that they various mrvodkas on there probably think they are being subtle compared to their local media.
Opps, should have thought about that more before posting. The active area is not exactly limited by the aperture size but related to it. If a sufficiently wide angle lens is used that could make it practical but if you need a long depth of field the aperture size is still going to be a big problem.
Basically it is just a really low resolution camera made out of discrete photodiodes. It's pretty cool that you can put something like this together quite easily now (though that is a lot of soldering) and a fun project. As for practical applications, well, that's just not really going to work. The active light collection area of the camera is the aperture size, which you have to make really small if you want any sensible depth of field, so the amount of useful energy you can collect is tiny and when you factor in colour filters it just gets silly tiny. You could have a dot sized solar cell next to the lens and it would generate more power than any practical system for much less effort.
Well in the 35 years until 2050, there will be approximately 23 more Moore's law doublings, which means computing chips will be around 8.4 million times more powerful than now. So around 60 iPhones 41's in 2050 will have the same computing power as all of the 500 million iPhones currently on the planet.
That should allow us to do a lot of cool stuff.
As an aside, I consider Moore's law as more a product of the geometric progression of chip lithography. You increase feature resolution by a linear amount and you get a square law increase in transistors per mm^2. The real limit then is really silicon physics and that is coming up reasonably quickly. My hope is that we find a completely new chip technology that has the potential to break out of this geometric feature limit problem and step over on to a completely new performance track. But conversely we could just as easily get stuck with silicon for a long time and not be able to do much more than cost reduction.
Unilateral negotiations suck. I imagine they got into the same mess as GT Advanced did with Apple. The reality is that in these situations you have to be prepared to just walk. If you've really got something they want then this will allow you to start negotiating properly. If you don't then the reality is you are just a commodity and you would never have gotten a fair contract. If you do get a contract under these conditions then make no mistake - the MBAs at companies like MS aren't stupid and will ensure they find the greatest fool who they can milk for maximum benefit.
The smartest guys in these situations will have a blind-siding strategy where they don't actually care about the core contract (so they can pretend to be the greatest fool), but get some sort of ancillary benefit - such as contacts at MS or marketing opportunities. They will carefully ring-fence the contract, get what they want and move on to their broader strategy when it flops over. Maybe even using the flop as part of their strategy. That is how the game is played.
Oh what about making the actual product you say? Hahaha. You must be an engineer!
The irony is that dilbert is right. If you're smart enough to see how this works you should just move into marketing. Being able to talk technobabble in a more plausible way (to everyone) should allow you to dominate.
This is the sad reality of the economy. The other sad reality is how engineers continue to moan about the broken system while simultaneously remaining the hamsters that allow it to perpetuate.
It doesn't matter whether it is illegal or not. John Key (the prime minister) changed the country's employment laws under urgency when Warner Brothers threatened to move the hobbit offshore due to a union problem. I doubt a loop hole that allowed the NZ public to circumvent the will of the studios is going to survive long. But he has a great smile so we keep voting him in.
I would flip the problem around and ask why proportionally more males seem to be sticklers for punishment and waste their talents going to work in a difficult field with little job security and low pay (relatively) when they could go do almost anything else and be much more successful?
I have a lot of friends who did engineering and are women, and they all left engineering because their skills were more valuable working elsewhere. Many now regret having done the degree in the first place since they never used any of the technical stuff they worked so hard to learn. Thing is they are not alone and more than half the guys in my class did the same. I hate to say this (as someone who does enjoy engineering) but those who are still doing it a decade later are a pretty odd bunch, mostly with very poor social skills. Since engineering is one of the few places you can succeed without having social skills, I wonder if it is more correlated with this than any kind of male discriminatory thing.
So the sad reality as far as I can tell, is that if you want more 'women in STEMS' you should encourage them to have rubbish social skills. Alternately you could improve the social skills of the few engineers that remain and then there would be no more engineers and the problem would be solved as well. Our economy doesn't care about making useful stuff anymore. It is just about getting some shiny crap from China, slapping some marketing and celebrity endorsements on it and laughing all the way to the bank.
I would like to believe that Microsoft really has turned a new corner with this more open strategy but it really is hard. We had to put up with so much rubbish from them over the years with Windows. As someone getting into web development it is also just blatantly obvious they tried to sabotage the adoption of a common standard for a long as possible to prevent the web becoming a cross-platform environment (IE6 I am looking at you). And then there was the whole changing Office pointlessly every two years so you had to buy a faster computer and pay them more money.
In the end I think they are just a business business. What I mean by that is they don't really subscribe to any ideology, vision or values other than just dominating at all cost. There is no rule that says they can't do that and plenty of other companies do, so I don't blame them, but in the end unless I start hearing from MS employees that there has been a wholesale change in culture I just think this openness stuff will only last until they get back to a dominate position again.
Having said that they do make some good dev tools and I won't turn my back on them. Because in the end the best thing to keep all the big companies in line is to ensure that none of them can get into a entirely dominate position, even if they promise us they won't be evil...
It depends though. If you mean moving from 640x480 to 1024x768 where the pixels cannot be resolved by the naked eye (aka retina), then you can scale it up smoothly provided the graphics are in vector format. The normal issue is that the graphics are not in vector format, and are usually optimised to make use of pixel boundaries to improve the resolution (i.e. a sharp edge looks infinitely sharp because it is placed at a pixel boundary). When interpolated the underlying lack of image quality becomes apparent unless you interpolate by an integer factor, which is what Apple did when it moved to retina.
The real solution is to move all graphics operations towards vector based formats, then it won't matter what the pixel count is as long as the dpi is visually high enough. Since this is actually much easier to develop for (it is much nicer to just draw up your icons etc in illustrator than having to mess around getting pixel boundaries right at different dpis) it shouldn't be hard to convince developers to shift. The main issue right now is that many screens are still quite low dpi.
nobody in display industry cares about Oculus Rift. For each Oculus Rift there is million phones sold. World is not Slashdot dot org.
Exactly. But that is why this is such a brilliant development. Developing a new display line is expensive, and most companies can probably not justify the investment in the 'hope' that VR becomes a viable market. However, it is reasonably likely that the marketing goons can drum up a mega-pixel war on high end smart phone screens and move the tech along that way. The net result will be cheap high dpi screens that can be used in VR, and that is a great outcome for the world of Slashdot dot org.
So yes you're right nobody cares about the Occulus, but the real tangible application of this pointless increase in resolution will indeed be for the Occulus. And in the end, there are good reasons to believe VR will end up being something a lot of people will care about at some point in the future. Sure it's a novelty, but that basically sums up the entire tech/entertainment industry and that seems to be doing pretty well.
It looks like the main focus of the research is really around haptics. They seem to have a pretty cool whole-arm haptic interface and talk about using it to sense body motion to infer subtle control inputs from the user. That is pretty cool. They also mention that the robot can 'feel' items around it and, I am assuming, feed this back to the operator using the haptic actuators in a natural way.
I would imagine the firefighter thing is just an application domain to give them a framework for developing the tech, and to make it easier to do a press release for the general public. In any event, I would have thought a better application would be a robotic guide dog for vision impaired people. At least that doesn't normally have to climb through a fire damaged building.
$17000 for the Edition, yet the average Apple factory worker earns $1.50 per hour (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/29/apple-investugates-claims-china-factory)
I guess the sociopathic nature of Steve Jobs is also a enduring Apple Value.
All the Formula E cars are charged using a single generator that uses glycerol as fuel.
Don't forget the jumbo jets required to get these things between tracks. As with most motor racing, the fuel used in the cars during the race is really the least of the environmental problems.
Because the power output of an electric motor is torque * rotation speed. The electric motor can produce max torque across the speed range (roughly for most types anyway), but the power output still increase with the RPM. So if you want to get max power at any wheel speed you want to keep the motor revs up.
Ground effects cars were crazy though. I kinda think it is a good thing that the best driver in F1 doesn't simply correspond to who is the most suicidal. And something like the Williams FW15C was going to render the skill of the driver almost redundant if that seam of development had been allowed to continue.
On the other hand those cars and others (like bernie's fan car, and even the blow diffuser and f-duct) are part of the interesting narrative that is F1 and I do think the FIA has become so concerned with preventing another Lotus 79 or Williams FW15C that they are pre-emptively killing any chance for real technical innovation.
But they're just a bunch of businessmen now. Once Bernie goes I think it will sadly fall apart. The management, rights holders and teams will end up spending more time in court than out on the track. As much as I think Bernie is a dick, like an dodgy book keeper, I also think he maintains a careful balance of handouts and ego massaging that allows the various interests involved to generally get some cars out on track every weekend.
I do think the future of cars/racing is electric, but for me there is something spine tinglingly impressive about this (V8 F1 cars running up eau rouge):
But since the FIA is currently doing its best to ruin F1, these electric cars will probably compare pretty good in a few more years. Oh well, at least we have the memories.
It doesn't matter. The idea of these lawsuits is to just cause enough trouble that it becomes more economical for Facebook to settle than to spend the money on a legal defence. The litigants in this case likely have a still-born company so don't have anything to lose anyway. They are probably not even paying the lawyers involved.
There really isn't much Facebook can do. If they see it through to a successful defence I assure you the litigants will have zero funds to pay out Facebook's costs and will just go under, probably popping up a week later as a new company. So Facebook are going to have to pay a lot of money anyway and seeing the case through to trial also runs the small risk of having a judgement against them. Anyway you can see that if you were unscrupulous and in the litigants position it isn't a bad option if you can't make money from, you know, an actual business.
It is a stupid system, but I guess the mitigating factor is it will only happen to you if you are really rich.
Additionally, one advantage of being a BBC show is that he didn't have any advertisers to offend.
The most valuable advertisers for a motoring show are always going to be car/automotive companies, and trying to convince them to keep feeding you money is not particularly compatible with slagging off their products, particularly in jest.
I think he probably took for granted the freedom the BBC actually gave him to speak his mind (about cars). It may turn out that the PC brigade were much more understanding than the world of advertising driven commercial TV. You only have to look at the way the Telegraph shutdown debate about HSBC's (one of their big advertisers) Swiss tax evasion scheme to see what eventually wins out.
Haha. Anyone who has been to a South East Asian country knows all about this. You get a cheap price for the taxi and then spend half the day at the driver's cousin's Gem store on Silom Road trying to convince them to take you to see the real Giant Buddha.
It's funny how you add a splash of paint and some suits to a scam and everyone thinks the western world is 'advanced'.
For me the problem isn't so much the machines, it is that we still have a political/economic system based on the idea that everybody needs to work to survive, yet we are quickly creating a society where only the smartest are able to do that.
In Finland you seem to have a much better appreciation of this and invest into things like education so that people can work in these new jobs in addition to having a more redistributive income tax system. However this is not common throughout the western world, and indeed in countries like the UK the quality and value of the education system has been eroded (thanks to the for-profit focus) over the last decade to the point where many graduates leave with little more than debt. In addition the de-facto tax system here is heavily skewed in favour of the wealthy (if you own capital it is easy to evade tax).
This dysfunction is what automation threatens to expose, and I think this is more what the original poster is lamenting when s/he talks about the problems with these machines.
Having been to Helsinki many years ago, you have a very unique culture and socio-political system. I hope you can serve as an example for others as to how this sort of automation tech can improve life for everybody rather than destroy the middle class.
I had one of the third generation iPods (no moving buttons). I'm an EE, and remember what tech was like back then. I mean, basically the iPod was amazing in its context. It had a big graphics screen when most products still had those old alphanumeric character displays. I remember it even had a white LED back light! That was just phenomenal back then. And capacitive touch that worked so well was a huge novelty. When I bought it I remember everyone in the office spent ages playing with the UI.
The thing was pretty revolutionary, though I mean in the end, that is like saying if you buy a really expensive luxury car it is going to be more impressive than a Toyota. But still, there was certainly something pretty cool tech wise about it and the original iPhone. I don't know why tech people try to deny this - I hated the hype and lock in but their products weren't stupid.
The trouble for Apple today is none of this new stuff they are doing (iWatch, iTV etc) has anything near the wow factor anymore. Sadly I suspect they are just going to head towards more defensive positions, where they lock you in more and more rather than entice you into the walled garden with interesting products. Jobs was a dick, but at least when he demoed that first iPhone the UI was pretty amazing. I remember the first time I played with it and it was nothing I had ever seen before. In contrast, watching Tim Cook try to whip up some fake enthusiasm for the iWatch was pretty tragic.
Slashdot Mirror
It's much much worse than that. If you're slightly above middle class wealthy (more than a few million) you don't pay any tax, and if you're completely immoral you can even put yourself into an income position where you, your spouse or children are getting handouts from the state (e.g. education grants, child tax credits). I'm serious look into it a bit.
http://www.accounting-degree.org/accounting-tricks/
I can't find the link now but the investment banks have a great scheme where they essentially loan you money against the capital gains on your shares so you never have to cash them in and pay the CGT. When you die they use an estate tax loophole to pay themselves back so nobody has to pay any tax. Also you might have heard about freeports in places like Luxemborg airport where the rich literally fly in with assets and trade them with other rich people using a historic loop hole around the tax jurisdiction of the sale.
In general I applaud this sort of restraint, but I hope it is the full story. As anyone who has contracted knows, you are a knob to accept a salary if you can avoid it. Having the money come out in dividends, capital gains or trust/company income basically takes you from a punitive tax regime into one where you can manage tax in remarkably creative ways.
For example if you want to run a race car, you can quite happily claim back the costs of racing as an advertising expense so long as you put a logo on your car. In some countries you can even run the racing company at a loss which can be offset against other income streams. Want an overseas holiday? There are rules around a business meeting at the start and end that can make the majority of a trip deductible. Even easier if it is to just attend a professional conference that just happens to be in a tropical holiday destination (hint hint). Personally I found this sort of slight of hand quite disgusting, but many of these issues are very hard to define clearly in legislation.
Anyway, point is this is a good move, but may not tell the full story. Lets hope it does.
This is basically crowd sourced media in general. The great achievement of web 2.0 is that PR companies etc can now pretend to be 'the people' while feeding us with the messages they want to broadcast. I find this very dishonest. At least when Scarlett Johansson tells me I should buy a soda stream on TV I'm not sitting there wondering if she is actually an expert in carbonated beverages and should be trusted.
For a master class in how ridiculous it is, just go read any comment page on the Guardian associated with an article about Russia. What scares me is that they various mrvodkas on there probably think they are being subtle compared to their local media.
Opps, should have thought about that more before posting. The active area is not exactly limited by the aperture size but related to it. If a sufficiently wide angle lens is used that could make it practical but if you need a long depth of field the aperture size is still going to be a big problem.
Basically it is just a really low resolution camera made out of discrete photodiodes. It's pretty cool that you can put something like this together quite easily now (though that is a lot of soldering) and a fun project. As for practical applications, well, that's just not really going to work. The active light collection area of the camera is the aperture size, which you have to make really small if you want any sensible depth of field, so the amount of useful energy you can collect is tiny and when you factor in colour filters it just gets silly tiny. You could have a dot sized solar cell next to the lens and it would generate more power than any practical system for much less effort.
Well in the 35 years until 2050, there will be approximately 23 more Moore's law doublings, which means computing chips will be around 8.4 million times more powerful than now. So around 60 iPhones 41's in 2050 will have the same computing power as all of the 500 million iPhones currently on the planet.
That should allow us to do a lot of cool stuff.
As an aside, I consider Moore's law as more a product of the geometric progression of chip lithography. You increase feature resolution by a linear amount and you get a square law increase in transistors per mm^2. The real limit then is really silicon physics and that is coming up reasonably quickly. My hope is that we find a completely new chip technology that has the potential to break out of this geometric feature limit problem and step over on to a completely new performance track. But conversely we could just as easily get stuck with silicon for a long time and not be able to do much more than cost reduction.
Unilateral negotiations suck. I imagine they got into the same mess as GT Advanced did with Apple. The reality is that in these situations you have to be prepared to just walk. If you've really got something they want then this will allow you to start negotiating properly. If you don't then the reality is you are just a commodity and you would never have gotten a fair contract. If you do get a contract under these conditions then make no mistake - the MBAs at companies like MS aren't stupid and will ensure they find the greatest fool who they can milk for maximum benefit.
The smartest guys in these situations will have a blind-siding strategy where they don't actually care about the core contract (so they can pretend to be the greatest fool), but get some sort of ancillary benefit - such as contacts at MS or marketing opportunities. They will carefully ring-fence the contract, get what they want and move on to their broader strategy when it flops over. Maybe even using the flop as part of their strategy. That is how the game is played.
Oh what about making the actual product you say? Hahaha. You must be an engineer!
The irony is that dilbert is right. If you're smart enough to see how this works you should just move into marketing. Being able to talk technobabble in a more plausible way (to everyone) should allow you to dominate.
This is the sad reality of the economy. The other sad reality is how engineers continue to moan about the broken system while simultaneously remaining the hamsters that allow it to perpetuate.
It doesn't matter whether it is illegal or not. John Key (the prime minister) changed the country's employment laws under urgency when Warner Brothers threatened to move the hobbit offshore due to a union problem. I doubt a loop hole that allowed the NZ public to circumvent the will of the studios is going to survive long. But he has a great smile so we keep voting him in.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/oct/31/warner-bros-new-zealand-hobbit-film
I would flip the problem around and ask why proportionally more males seem to be sticklers for punishment and waste their talents going to work in a difficult field with little job security and low pay (relatively) when they could go do almost anything else and be much more successful?
I have a lot of friends who did engineering and are women, and they all left engineering because their skills were more valuable working elsewhere. Many now regret having done the degree in the first place since they never used any of the technical stuff they worked so hard to learn. Thing is they are not alone and more than half the guys in my class did the same. I hate to say this (as someone who does enjoy engineering) but those who are still doing it a decade later are a pretty odd bunch, mostly with very poor social skills. Since engineering is one of the few places you can succeed without having social skills, I wonder if it is more correlated with this than any kind of male discriminatory thing.
So the sad reality as far as I can tell, is that if you want more 'women in STEMS' you should encourage them to have rubbish social skills. Alternately you could improve the social skills of the few engineers that remain and then there would be no more engineers and the problem would be solved as well. Our economy doesn't care about making useful stuff anymore. It is just about getting some shiny crap from China, slapping some marketing and celebrity endorsements on it and laughing all the way to the bank.
I would like to believe that Microsoft really has turned a new corner with this more open strategy but it really is hard. We had to put up with so much rubbish from them over the years with Windows. As someone getting into web development it is also just blatantly obvious they tried to sabotage the adoption of a common standard for a long as possible to prevent the web becoming a cross-platform environment (IE6 I am looking at you). And then there was the whole changing Office pointlessly every two years so you had to buy a faster computer and pay them more money.
In the end I think they are just a business business. What I mean by that is they don't really subscribe to any ideology, vision or values other than just dominating at all cost. There is no rule that says they can't do that and plenty of other companies do, so I don't blame them, but in the end unless I start hearing from MS employees that there has been a wholesale change in culture I just think this openness stuff will only last until they get back to a dominate position again.
Having said that they do make some good dev tools and I won't turn my back on them. Because in the end the best thing to keep all the big companies in line is to ensure that none of them can get into a entirely dominate position, even if they promise us they won't be evil...
It depends though. If you mean moving from 640x480 to 1024x768 where the pixels cannot be resolved by the naked eye (aka retina), then you can scale it up smoothly provided the graphics are in vector format. The normal issue is that the graphics are not in vector format, and are usually optimised to make use of pixel boundaries to improve the resolution (i.e. a sharp edge looks infinitely sharp because it is placed at a pixel boundary). When interpolated the underlying lack of image quality becomes apparent unless you interpolate by an integer factor, which is what Apple did when it moved to retina.
The real solution is to move all graphics operations towards vector based formats, then it won't matter what the pixel count is as long as the dpi is visually high enough. Since this is actually much easier to develop for (it is much nicer to just draw up your icons etc in illustrator than having to mess around getting pixel boundaries right at different dpis) it shouldn't be hard to convince developers to shift. The main issue right now is that many screens are still quite low dpi.
nobody in display industry cares about Oculus Rift. For each Oculus Rift there is million phones sold. World is not Slashdot dot org.
Exactly. But that is why this is such a brilliant development. Developing a new display line is expensive, and most companies can probably not justify the investment in the 'hope' that VR becomes a viable market. However, it is reasonably likely that the marketing goons can drum up a mega-pixel war on high end smart phone screens and move the tech along that way. The net result will be cheap high dpi screens that can be used in VR, and that is a great outcome for the world of Slashdot dot org.
So yes you're right nobody cares about the Occulus, but the real tangible application of this pointless increase in resolution will indeed be for the Occulus. And in the end, there are good reasons to believe VR will end up being something a lot of people will care about at some point in the future. Sure it's a novelty, but that basically sums up the entire tech/entertainment industry and that seems to be doing pretty well.
I know it's a joke, but this does pretty much sum up the 'internet of things'.
* Sigh *
It looks like the main focus of the research is really around haptics. They seem to have a pretty cool whole-arm haptic interface and talk about using it to sense body motion to infer subtle control inputs from the user. That is pretty cool. They also mention that the robot can 'feel' items around it and, I am assuming, feed this back to the operator using the haptic actuators in a natural way.
I would imagine the firefighter thing is just an application domain to give them a framework for developing the tech, and to make it easier to do a press release for the general public. In any event, I would have thought a better application would be a robotic guide dog for vision impaired people. At least that doesn't normally have to climb through a fire damaged building.
$17000 for the Edition, yet the average Apple factory worker earns $1.50 per hour (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/29/apple-investugates-claims-china-factory)
I guess the sociopathic nature of Steve Jobs is also a enduring Apple Value.
All the Formula E cars are charged using a single generator that uses glycerol as fuel.
Don't forget the jumbo jets required to get these things between tracks. As with most motor racing, the fuel used in the cars during the race is really the least of the environmental problems.
Because the power output of an electric motor is torque * rotation speed. The electric motor can produce max torque across the speed range (roughly for most types anyway), but the power output still increase with the RPM. So if you want to get max power at any wheel speed you want to keep the motor revs up.
Hence the gearbox.
Ground effects cars were crazy though. I kinda think it is a good thing that the best driver in F1 doesn't simply correspond to who is the most suicidal. And something like the Williams FW15C was going to render the skill of the driver almost redundant if that seam of development had been allowed to continue.
On the other hand those cars and others (like bernie's fan car, and even the blow diffuser and f-duct) are part of the interesting narrative that is F1 and I do think the FIA has become so concerned with preventing another Lotus 79 or Williams FW15C that they are pre-emptively killing any chance for real technical innovation.
But they're just a bunch of businessmen now. Once Bernie goes I think it will sadly fall apart. The management, rights holders and teams will end up spending more time in court than out on the track. As much as I think Bernie is a dick, like an dodgy book keeper, I also think he maintains a careful balance of handouts and ego massaging that allows the various interests involved to generally get some cars out on track every weekend.
I do think the future of cars/racing is electric, but for me there is something spine tinglingly impressive about this (V8 F1 cars running up eau rouge):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
But since the FIA is currently doing its best to ruin F1, these electric cars will probably compare pretty good in a few more years. Oh well, at least we have the memories.
It doesn't matter. The idea of these lawsuits is to just cause enough trouble that it becomes more economical for Facebook to settle than to spend the money on a legal defence. The litigants in this case likely have a still-born company so don't have anything to lose anyway. They are probably not even paying the lawyers involved.
There really isn't much Facebook can do. If they see it through to a successful defence I assure you the litigants will have zero funds to pay out Facebook's costs and will just go under, probably popping up a week later as a new company. So Facebook are going to have to pay a lot of money anyway and seeing the case through to trial also runs the small risk of having a judgement against them. Anyway you can see that if you were unscrupulous and in the litigants position it isn't a bad option if you can't make money from, you know, an actual business.
It is a stupid system, but I guess the mitigating factor is it will only happen to you if you are really rich.
Additionally, one advantage of being a BBC show is that he didn't have any advertisers to offend.
The most valuable advertisers for a motoring show are always going to be car/automotive companies, and trying to convince them to keep feeding you money is not particularly compatible with slagging off their products, particularly in jest.
I think he probably took for granted the freedom the BBC actually gave him to speak his mind (about cars). It may turn out that the PC brigade were much more understanding than the world of advertising driven commercial TV. You only have to look at the way the Telegraph shutdown debate about HSBC's (one of their big advertisers) Swiss tax evasion scheme to see what eventually wins out.
Haha. Anyone who has been to a South East Asian country knows all about this. You get a cheap price for the taxi and then spend half the day at the driver's cousin's Gem store on Silom Road trying to convince them to take you to see the real Giant Buddha. It's funny how you add a splash of paint and some suits to a scam and everyone thinks the western world is 'advanced'.
For me the problem isn't so much the machines, it is that we still have a political/economic system based on the idea that everybody needs to work to survive, yet we are quickly creating a society where only the smartest are able to do that.
In Finland you seem to have a much better appreciation of this and invest into things like education so that people can work in these new jobs in addition to having a more redistributive income tax system. However this is not common throughout the western world, and indeed in countries like the UK the quality and value of the education system has been eroded (thanks to the for-profit focus) over the last decade to the point where many graduates leave with little more than debt. In addition the de-facto tax system here is heavily skewed in favour of the wealthy (if you own capital it is easy to evade tax).
This dysfunction is what automation threatens to expose, and I think this is more what the original poster is lamenting when s/he talks about the problems with these machines.
Having been to Helsinki many years ago, you have a very unique culture and socio-political system. I hope you can serve as an example for others as to how this sort of automation tech can improve life for everybody rather than destroy the middle class.
I had one of the third generation iPods (no moving buttons). I'm an EE, and remember what tech was like back then. I mean, basically the iPod was amazing in its context. It had a big graphics screen when most products still had those old alphanumeric character displays. I remember it even had a white LED back light! That was just phenomenal back then. And capacitive touch that worked so well was a huge novelty. When I bought it I remember everyone in the office spent ages playing with the UI.
The thing was pretty revolutionary, though I mean in the end, that is like saying if you buy a really expensive luxury car it is going to be more impressive than a Toyota. But still, there was certainly something pretty cool tech wise about it and the original iPhone. I don't know why tech people try to deny this - I hated the hype and lock in but their products weren't stupid.
The trouble for Apple today is none of this new stuff they are doing (iWatch, iTV etc) has anything near the wow factor anymore. Sadly I suspect they are just going to head towards more defensive positions, where they lock you in more and more rather than entice you into the walled garden with interesting products. Jobs was a dick, but at least when he demoed that first iPhone the UI was pretty amazing. I remember the first time I played with it and it was nothing I had ever seen before. In contrast, watching Tim Cook try to whip up some fake enthusiasm for the iWatch was pretty tragic.