It’s not an easy problem to solve, as the article points out. Laziness has nothing to do with it. On the other hand, my last name has been flagged “offensive” for years... because it has an apostrophe in it which choked many websites, airline reservation systems, etc. That problem has been solved in the end, thanks to Bobby Tables.
You make a good point; it's not just "offensive" names that get flagged. I know someone with a two letter last name with no vowels; because immigration shortened the grandfather's name from the original Polish to 2 letters. Websites, credit card companies, etc. refuse to believe you can have a 2 letter last name with no vowels. Some don't like spaces either, assuming that if you have a dual last name it must be hyphenated.
Does any top tier ISP provide really, truly, honest "Unlimited" service? Anyone? At $40/month? No.
The Santa Clara Fire Department doesn't have the $40/month plan. They are a big, well-equipped department with at least a dozen firehouses and hundreds and hundreds of firefighters, plus volunteers.
Exactly. They have a big enough account thy should have had a no throttle clause for their phones. Per there website, they have 330 employees across all departments, barely a blip on the total population of Santa Clara County. I would doubt that their use would impact the network so greatly that it would be a problem for VZW; and that avoids VZW trying to determine when an emergency is occurring. The fires are obvious but there are still plenty of other smaller situations that could chew through data as well.
So now we are associating lower metabolic rates with laziness in a species? fucking really? adapting to your environment with a lower metabolism is the very fucking definition of "survival of the fittest", perhaps the writers of this article need to actually understand what that means.
Exactly. Lower metabolism means less fuel requirements, thus less need to spend time feeding, larger population for a given food supply, all of which makes you more fit for survival. Even if you are slower and thus more susceptible to predation, having more of you means a greater chance any one individual will survive and procreate.
At that point, does it become cheaper to look for Gold outside of Earth- or get it from sea water?
The challenge is once the price reaches the point either i economically viable, especially for seawater, how long does the price stay high until the volume extracted causes the price to crash? It's a bit like oil; if price gets high enough to make shale oil profitable, other producers can up production to drive down the price and shutdown shale oil production; the main difference is the volume of crude available limits how long they ca do that.
The key is "mineable" gold. There may be only 175 thousand tons that are extractable from land, but there is an estimated 20 million tons in seawater; it's the cost to extract it that makes it uneconomical. If a way could be found to extract it cheaply, gold would follow the same path as aluminum.
When you sent in a resume and didn't even receive a reply telling you that you weren't selected. If you hear nothing, we weren't interested. Must be painful to find the shoe's on the other foot now...
Companies are starting to see what happens when market dynamics move against them. Having been called and said they want to interview me and then hearing nothing, I have little sympathy for companies. I can understand you had a better candidate, but if you expect to be treated properly look to your own behavior as well.
Consumers tend to make better decisions when they are informed. A sticker with the average lifespan and running cost of the product on should really help.
You have greater faith in the average consumer's ability to make rational decisions than I do. You assume they'll even value knowing such things and use it in the decision making process over price. Price already acts as a proxy for quality, and what are the best selling products?
iPhones aren't really the problem, it's stuff like household appliances. The cheap ones barely last 3 years a lot of the time.
Consumers share in the blame as well; your consumer appliance is a good example. People often don't want to pay for quality appliances that will last, they buy on price and hence get cheap junk. There are quality alternatives out there that will last. For example, I have a blender that costs 4 to 5 times that of your average cheap one, but it is built like a tank and will last a lifetime. You don't see it in the most stores because they wouldn't sell because of the price; for most stores it a race to have the cheapest price and you get what you pay for, or at least pay for everything you get.
Also stuff like software that is reliant on some server somewhere. What is the minimum lifetime of that service? A few years ago some smart TVs stopped playing YouTube because they dropped support for old devices. Imagine phones having a sticker that told you the earliest date that they would stop supplying updates.
I wish I knew the answer on how to deal with those issues. That will be a whole new challenge as people discover their TV, radio, whatever stopped working because the manufacturer dropped support and updates. As for updates, a company could say 5 years but that would not mean any new features would be added, just that they'd do patches and offer repair parts. It's not reasonable to expect them to add the same features that future versions of the software have and may require more memory and faster processors to run well. As for a 3rd party dropping support for formats your product needs, I think it is unreasonable to expect a manufacturer to maintain 3rd party compatibility. If you're rellying on a server you're taking the risk that server goes away, a company I am working with is developing software that runs on a cloud server but we are making it provider agnostic so we can move it if our vendor goes away.
This proposal is quite clever. They will have to put a sticker on the box that says "average time before something fails is X years", which instantly does two things:
1. Consumers know how long something will likely last, rather than just guessing based on brand reputation or anecdotes.
2. Longevity will become a selling point. Before they had stickers on vacuum cleaners showing how well they actually cleaned people just tended to buy the most powerful one, but now they make a more intelligent and informed decision.
Selling price isn't based cost of manufacture, it's based on what the market will stand. So for example goods often cost about the same in Europe as they do in the US (factoring in tax), but in Europe you get a much longer statutory warranty.
The problem with MTBF is that for most consumer electronic products it will be so long that most people will say "I'll replace it way before them." Even if 5% of the iPhones fail prematurely the sheer number made will make MBTF look good. Just look at HD MBTF's as an example. As for "about the same" the delta results from increase regulatory costs; and while I like the protections the EU affords me they are not without a cost. TINSTAAFL.
You can have longer warranties, you'll just pay more to cover the expected costs. You can buy replacement parts, but they won't be cheap nor does easily accessible mean easy to replace. You can get to the battery but need a special tool to carefully break the seal on the case and battery, and the battery is in three places to save space so you need to replace all three, which mens an hour or so of work; so by the time you do the repair the customer could get a refurb with warranty from us for the same price or less. Do you want to invest in the tools you need for the handful of repairs you might do?
... they have customers at all, it because there is no commercials in between anything. I see people will go downloading more again.
I doubt that is why most people have Netflix. Netflix has a large catalogue of content, that appeals to a wide audience. You don't have to go out and buy or rent a DVD to watch a movie. They have original content as well. All of this for a very low price. If commercials keep prices down and/or add more original content then many users, IMHO, won't care. Look at Spotify, they have 180 million users, of which 97 million use the free service and put up with ads. That indicates a lot of consumers will trade the hassle of ads for lower prices. In Netflix case, it will be more of a "Here is other content you may like" vs. "Buy This!!!" which may be more palatable since it appears to be less of an ad and more of a helpful suggestion. If Netflix wanted to go to an ad model, I'd do it by offering a price break - Willing to watch ads? We'll give you X% off the subscription price... That way, the viewer sees ads as a way to save money directly, not in some nebulous future avoidance of a price increase.
However, they do not train you on what it really looks, sounds and feels like when you fly. There is a lot of information you need when flying that comes from the seat of your pants and though the windscreen that is really hard to simulate at reasonable cost at home.
Pilot here. Can say the same. But remember that natural-born pilots fly with the guts, literally. You feel the flight in your stomach. You begin flying with glider planes.
This lack of gut-flying, and excessive reliance on simulators for everything, caused the crash of Air France 447: the pilot didn't feel the plane's attitude [falling while leveled] with his guts.
In addition, the flight control system design added to the problem, such as stopping stall warnings at high AoA and the restarting them as the pilot pushed the nose down, resulting in confusion about what was actually happening. As a result, when presented with conflicting information they failed to put the plane in an configuration they knew was level flight while they sorted out what was happening.
However, they do not train you on what it really looks, sounds and feels like when you fly. There is a lot of information you need when flying that comes from the seat of your pants and though the windscreen that is really hard to simulate at reasonable cost at home. Also, it's really hard to accurately simulate the visuals during approach and landing, especially when you get into the ground effect just before touch down. It's just not the same.
Exactly. You do not get the tactile or visual feedback that you get in the real world. Real world experience lets you develop that seat of the pants feel for what is happening beyond what you see on instruments; and allow you to correct even before the instruments show what is happening. That's the difference between a landing and an unplanned impact with the ground.
Fiat also has no value, as opposed to minerals, water, energy, food, etc.
Something only has value if somebdy else is willing to trade something else for it. Scarcity does not create value, gold is quite plentiful and copies of Ellison's Glass Teat are not, yet people value gold far more than Ellison’s excellent collection of essays.
reader poll: Is he joking? Serious? Are there really such people?
Yes. The technical term for them is fools; they are very important part of a well functioning market as they provide a steady stream of money for the taking.
Apple does have a well-thought-out security design. Maybe there are things wrong with it, but to say they 'just fix bugs' and don't think about overall security ignores the truth.
His point seems to be not that Apple doesn’t have well thought out security system but rather how they respond to bugs. Patching them is important but he is advocating also looking at the root causes of how they came into being so you can rework process to reduce the chances bugs are introduced. Patching problems rather than fixing causes is not unusual, I once had a plant manager tell me he didn’t have time to fix small problems because he had too many big ones. He was not happy when I pointed out the causes of both were usually the same, just some of the small ones never became big ones because of quick intervention or sheer luck.
Yeah, exactly: government control of the means of production. That's socialism. Schools, roads, police: not socialism.
We clearly disagree on the definition of government vs collective control. For example, government control of power production is not socialism, a group of farmers who create their own power generation capacity and exercise collective control of its use is.
Also, to the AC in this comments thread who redundantly posts that it was actually 670 voters of 3,704 registered voters, you should know that on election day, the aforementioned Secretary of State's own website showed that Mud Creek only had 276 registered voters. Magically after 670 votes were cast in Mud Creek, the Secretary of State's website was changed to say that there were actually 3,704 registered voters and not 276 as previously stated. Mud Creek's total population as of the 2010 census was fewer than 2,000 souls (men, women and children).
The Secretary of State is clearly just following the long standing tradition of letting dead people vote.
My voting place just uses plain scantron like paper ballots. Fill in the oval, stick it in the machine, done.
Keep all the ballots for at least 8 years or something, and if you ever need to verify the vote, take them out and check them by hand. (This assumes they are stored securely.)
[...]
While I could design something secure that uses touch screens and such, I still wouldn't trust it as much as this plain simple system. Sometimes simple wins. I doubt your going to improve on this design much, no matter how much you try to do so.
+1. People miss the importance of expense and effort. The important thing isn't that a system like this can't be compromised. It's that it is much, much more cumbersome to compromise it than an electronic system. It also has the deterrent effect of leaving a fair bit of evidence (paper trail, numerous co-conspirators needed, etc.) that it has been compromised.
You compromise it before the actual vote. In GA this was done by the county boss handing out the government check and filled out ballot at the same time to ensure a correct vote. For reference, see Jimmy Carter’s book An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood
What!! Negative. Socialism is not government services. Socialism is government control of the means of production. End of story. That's literally what it is.
No, It is not; socialism is collective control, such as a kibbutz. The term socialism has been misused, especially in the US, that most folks don’t understand its true meaning and how it figured in Marx’s economic theory.
This race to the bottom will only be stopped by Federal laws against special exemptions. Amazon is big enough without special perks thank you.
Except Congress likes to give them as well, such as an earmark, excuse me directed spending, to give money for a road sonWalMart builds in their district instead of next door or a tax break for a corporation, that theoretically anyone can get except only one company matches the specific requirements in the tax break.
A lot of the cities/areas on the list have some type of public transportation. For instance, DC, Mongomery County MD and Northern VA have the Washington Metro (although, due to maintenance & safety issues it's use at your own risk).
DC’s, despite its issues is pretty good for getting a round the city but also expensive. If Amazon went there it would probably be for political clout since the cost of living is very high. Montgomery County is what, $500k for a condo near the Metro?
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure, but it's not far from Peniston
Yup, but it's a long way from Intercourse. It's fortunate that Intercourse is only 15 minutes from Blue Ball.
It’s not an easy problem to solve, as the article points out. Laziness has nothing to do with it. On the other hand, my last name has been flagged “offensive” for years... because it has an apostrophe in it which choked many websites, airline reservation systems, etc. That problem has been solved in the end, thanks to Bobby Tables.
You make a good point; it's not just "offensive" names that get flagged. I know someone with a two letter last name with no vowels; because immigration shortened the grandfather's name from the original Polish to 2 letters. Websites, credit card companies, etc. refuse to believe you can have a 2 letter last name with no vowels. Some don't like spaces either, assuming that if you have a dual last name it must be hyphenated.
The Santa Clara Fire Department doesn't have the $40/month plan. They are a big, well-equipped department with at least a dozen firehouses and hundreds and hundreds of firefighters, plus volunteers.
Exactly. They have a big enough account thy should have had a no throttle clause for their phones. Per there website, they have 330 employees across all departments, barely a blip on the total population of Santa Clara County. I would doubt that their use would impact the network so greatly that it would be a problem for VZW; and that avoids VZW trying to determine when an emergency is occurring. The fires are obvious but there are still plenty of other smaller situations that could chew through data as well.
So now we are associating lower metabolic rates with laziness in a species? fucking really? adapting to your environment with a lower metabolism is the very fucking definition of "survival of the fittest", perhaps the writers of this article need to actually understand what that means.
Exactly. Lower metabolism means less fuel requirements, thus less need to spend time feeding, larger population for a given food supply, all of which makes you more fit for survival. Even if you are slower and thus more susceptible to predation, having more of you means a greater chance any one individual will survive and procreate.
At that point, does it become cheaper to look for Gold outside of Earth- or get it from sea water?
The challenge is once the price reaches the point either i economically viable, especially for seawater, how long does the price stay high until the volume extracted causes the price to crash? It's a bit like oil; if price gets high enough to make shale oil profitable, other producers can up production to drive down the price and shutdown shale oil production; the main difference is the volume of crude available limits how long they ca do that.
There's a definite limit to how much gold is on Earth, and it's surprisingly small:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magaz...
The key is "mineable" gold. There may be only 175 thousand tons that are extractable from land, but there is an estimated 20 million tons in seawater; it's the cost to extract it that makes it uneconomical. If a way could be found to extract it cheaply, gold would follow the same path as aluminum.
Price acts a proxy for quality? Really? I have some Monster Cables to sell you!
Yes, people believe higher prices indicate higher quality, whether it is true or not.
When you sent in a resume and didn't even receive a reply telling you that you weren't selected. If you hear nothing, we weren't interested. Must be painful to find the shoe's on the other foot now...
Companies are starting to see what happens when market dynamics move against them. Having been called and said they want to interview me and then hearing nothing, I have little sympathy for companies. I can understand you had a better candidate, but if you expect to be treated properly look to your own behavior as well.
Consumers tend to make better decisions when they are informed. A sticker with the average lifespan and running cost of the product on should really help.
You have greater faith in the average consumer's ability to make rational decisions than I do. You assume they'll even value knowing such things and use it in the decision making process over price. Price already acts as a proxy for quality, and what are the best selling products?
iPhones aren't really the problem, it's stuff like household appliances. The cheap ones barely last 3 years a lot of the time.
Consumers share in the blame as well; your consumer appliance is a good example. People often don't want to pay for quality appliances that will last, they buy on price and hence get cheap junk. There are quality alternatives out there that will last. For example, I have a blender that costs 4 to 5 times that of your average cheap one, but it is built like a tank and will last a lifetime. You don't see it in the most stores because they wouldn't sell because of the price; for most stores it a race to have the cheapest price and you get what you pay for, or at least pay for everything you get.
Also stuff like software that is reliant on some server somewhere. What is the minimum lifetime of that service? A few years ago some smart TVs stopped playing YouTube because they dropped support for old devices. Imagine phones having a sticker that told you the earliest date that they would stop supplying updates.
I wish I knew the answer on how to deal with those issues. That will be a whole new challenge as people discover their TV, radio, whatever stopped working because the manufacturer dropped support and updates. As for updates, a company could say 5 years but that would not mean any new features would be added, just that they'd do patches and offer repair parts. It's not reasonable to expect them to add the same features that future versions of the software have and may require more memory and faster processors to run well. As for a 3rd party dropping support for formats your product needs, I think it is unreasonable to expect a manufacturer to maintain 3rd party compatibility. If you're rellying on a server you're taking the risk that server goes away, a company I am working with is developing software that runs on a cloud server but we are making it provider agnostic so we can move it if our vendor goes away.
This proposal is quite clever. They will have to put a sticker on the box that says "average time before something fails is X years", which instantly does two things:
1. Consumers know how long something will likely last, rather than just guessing based on brand reputation or anecdotes.
2. Longevity will become a selling point. Before they had stickers on vacuum cleaners showing how well they actually cleaned people just tended to buy the most powerful one, but now they make a more intelligent and informed decision.
Selling price isn't based cost of manufacture, it's based on what the market will stand. So for example goods often cost about the same in Europe as they do in the US (factoring in tax), but in Europe you get a much longer statutory warranty.
The problem with MTBF is that for most consumer electronic products it will be so long that most people will say "I'll replace it way before them." Even if 5% of the iPhones fail prematurely the sheer number made will make MBTF look good. Just look at HD MBTF's as an example. As for "about the same" the delta results from increase regulatory costs; and while I like the protections the EU affords me they are not without a cost. TINSTAAFL.
You can have longer warranties, you'll just pay more to cover the expected costs. You can buy replacement parts, but they won't be cheap nor does easily accessible mean easy to replace. You can get to the battery but need a special tool to carefully break the seal on the case and battery, and the battery is in three places to save space so you need to replace all three, which mens an hour or so of work; so by the time you do the repair the customer could get a refurb with warranty from us for the same price or less. Do you want to invest in the tools you need for the handful of repairs you might do?
... they have customers at all, it because there is no commercials in between anything. I see people will go downloading more again.
I doubt that is why most people have Netflix. Netflix has a large catalogue of content, that appeals to a wide audience. You don't have to go out and buy or rent a DVD to watch a movie. They have original content as well. All of this for a very low price. If commercials keep prices down and /or add more original content then many users, IMHO, won't care. Look at Spotify, they have 180 million users, of which 97 million use the free service and put up with ads. That indicates a lot of consumers will trade the hassle of ads for lower prices. In Netflix case, it will be more of a "Here is other content you may like" vs. "Buy This!!!" which may be more palatable since it appears to be less of an ad and more of a helpful suggestion. If Netflix wanted to go to an ad model, I'd do it by offering a price break - Willing to watch ads? We'll give you X% off the subscription price... That way, the viewer sees ads as a way to save money directly, not in some nebulous future avoidance of a price increase.
However, they do not train you on what it really looks, sounds and feels like when you fly. There is a lot of information you need when flying that comes from the seat of your pants and though the windscreen that is really hard to simulate at reasonable cost at home.
Pilot here. Can say the same. But remember that natural-born pilots fly with the guts, literally. You feel the flight in your stomach. You begin flying with glider planes.
This lack of gut-flying, and excessive reliance on simulators for everything, caused the crash of Air France 447: the pilot didn't feel the plane's attitude [falling while leveled] with his guts.
In addition, the flight control system design added to the problem, such as stopping stall warnings at high AoA and the restarting them as the pilot pushed the nose down, resulting in confusion about what was actually happening. As a result, when presented with conflicting information they failed to put the plane in an configuration they knew was level flight while they sorted out what was happening.
However, they do not train you on what it really looks, sounds and feels like when you fly. There is a lot of information you need when flying that comes from the seat of your pants and though the windscreen that is really hard to simulate at reasonable cost at home. Also, it's really hard to accurately simulate the visuals during approach and landing, especially when you get into the ground effect just before touch down. It's just not the same.
Exactly. You do not get the tactile or visual feedback that you get in the real world. Real world experience lets you develop that seat of the pants feel for what is happening beyond what you see on instruments; and allow you to correct even before the instruments show what is happening. That's the difference between a landing and an unplanned impact with the ground.
Fiat also has no value, as opposed to minerals, water, energy, food, etc.
Something only has value if somebdy else is willing to trade something else for it. Scarcity does not create value, gold is quite plentiful and copies of Ellison's Glass Teat are not, yet people value gold far more than Ellison’s excellent collection of essays.
reader poll: Is he joking? Serious? Are there really such people?
Yes. The technical term for them is fools; they are very important part of a well functioning market as they provide a steady stream of money for the taking.
Apple does have a well-thought-out security design. Maybe there are things wrong with it, but to say they 'just fix bugs' and don't think about overall security ignores the truth.
His point seems to be not that Apple doesn’t have well thought out security system but rather how they respond to bugs. Patching them is important but he is advocating also looking at the root causes of how they came into being so you can rework process to reduce the chances bugs are introduced. Patching problems rather than fixing causes is not unusual, I once had a plant manager tell me he didn’t have time to fix small problems because he had too many big ones. He was not happy when I pointed out the causes of both were usually the same, just some of the small ones never became big ones because of quick intervention or sheer luck.
Much easier to just start the day with ballot boxes half full of pre filled out 'votes'.
They did that too but accident;y left them rubber banded together and in alphabetical order. They couldn’t even get fraud right.
Yeah, exactly: government control of the means of production. That's socialism. Schools, roads, police: not socialism.
We clearly disagree on the definition of government vs collective control. For example, government control of power production is not socialism, a group of farmers who create their own power generation capacity and exercise collective control of its use is.
Also, to the AC in this comments thread who redundantly posts that it was actually 670 voters of 3,704 registered voters, you should know that on election day, the aforementioned Secretary of State's own website showed that Mud Creek only had 276 registered voters. Magically after 670 votes were cast in Mud Creek, the Secretary of State's website was changed to say that there were actually 3,704 registered voters and not 276 as previously stated. Mud Creek's total population as of the 2010 census was fewer than 2,000 souls (men, women and children).
The Secretary of State is clearly just following the long standing tradition of letting dead people vote.
+1. People miss the importance of expense and effort. The important thing isn't that a system like this can't be compromised. It's that it is much, much more cumbersome to compromise it than an electronic system. It also has the deterrent effect of leaving a fair bit of evidence (paper trail, numerous co-conspirators needed, etc.) that it has been compromised.
You compromise it before the actual vote. In GA this was done by the county boss handing out the government check and filled out ballot at the same time to ensure a correct vote. For reference, see Jimmy Carter’s book An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood
What!! Negative. Socialism is not government services. Socialism is government control of the means of production. End of story. That's literally what it is.
No, It is not; socialism is collective control, such as a kibbutz. The term socialism has been misused, especially in the US, that most folks don’t understand its true meaning and how it figured in Marx’s economic theory.
This race to the bottom will only be stopped by Federal laws against special exemptions. Amazon is big enough without special perks thank you.
Except Congress likes to give them as well, such as an earmark, excuse me directed spending, to give money for a road sonWalMart builds in their district instead of next door or a tax break for a corporation, that theoretically anyone can get except only one company matches the specific requirements in the tax break.
A lot of the cities/areas on the list have some type of public transportation. For instance, DC, Mongomery County MD and Northern VA have the Washington Metro (although, due to maintenance & safety issues it's use at your own risk).
DC’s, despite its issues is pretty good for getting a round the city but also expensive. If Amazon went there it would probably be for political clout since the cost of living is very high. Montgomery County is what, $500k for a condo near the Metro?