Apple has roughly 175 billion in cash and Tesla's current market cap is around 35B. If Apple wants to get into the car business might as well jump in feet first. Not to mention you get one of the greatest CEO visionaries Elon Musk, since Steve Jobs. The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Apple is building its one electric vehicle that resembles a minivan.
Why buy Tesla when you can hire them for a lot less:
Musk also said Apple has been trying to poach Tesla employees, offering $250,000 signing bonuses and 60 percent salary increases.
“Apple tries very hard to recruit from Tesla,” he said. “But so far they’ve actually recruited very few people.”
So is Apple making those offers because they think those employees are that valuable to Apple, or to Tesla?
The battery idea has some problems. Batteries are not interchangeable - age and quality matters. You might drive up to the station with a shiny new battery, get it replaced - and your new battery is two years old and only has half the effective capacity. Or worse, you might get given a battery which was previously damaged in an accident and is now prone to catch fire, or which a previous owner hacked to disable the under-voltage protection circuit and squeeze a bit more capacity from while ruining the cells, or which was manufactured by the cheapest factory in China with a counterfeir controller chip - all things that expose the station operator to liability. The only way it would work would be to inspect every battery as it came in and before sending it out again, which means every station needs a skilled attendant and frequently needs to buy new batteries. Expensive.
You own the car but the auto-maker owns the battery and automatically replaces bad batteries free of charge.
You go up to the charging station swap out the spent for the new, the spent goes to a charging station that runs a diagnostic during charging, if the battery fails the diagnostic the attendant sets it aside, then once a week they call the automaker who sends someone around to pick up the duds and drop off replacements.
Since owners don't need to buy replacement batteries there's less of a market for counterfeits, and if you can make the verification works the only extra labour is the weekly exchange.
Right? So don't hand them the phone. Hold it up so they can scan the QR code on the display. I don't hand my phone to the TSA Security guard validating my boarding pass, I just hold my phone over the scanner.
Fine in theory until the officer opens with "can you please hand me your phone so I can check your license information".
People have trouble saying no to completely unreasonable and unnecessary requests from cops, how many people do you think will start a police interaction by rejecting what sounds like a reasonable request for a standard procedure?
>. has failed to turn many of its innovations into new moneymakers.
It doesn't matter how many don't end up bringing major revenue. It only matters that a few do. Of Google+ is a complete failure and Android has 75% of the market, Google wins big. Their newsgroup site shuts down while Gmail huge is a huge success, Google does quite well.
They can well afford to invest $10 million each into trying ten different things if just one those goes on to make $250 million.
If Google becomes THE autonomous car company, it doesn't matter that they also experimented with ten other things that didn't bdo great - and even the ones that don't do great sometimes make a little money.
Google will not be the autonomous car company. all the major car companies have but researching self given cars since before Google existed, they are not going to use Google's system so they can data mine their customers. They will do that them selves.
Besides which the Google car is to limited, 25 MPH max (so far), not tested in heavy rain or snow, the need to map the roads down to the inch will slow down adoption too.
The same could be said of Tesla Motors.
Established car companies have a brand in that market to maintain. Google has no such burden, consumers have far lower expectations of a Google car and if it does fail it doesn't really affect Google's other offerings.
I think this is less the case of "we found a bug in package X" and more like "we've been getting a lot of attacks from phishing group Y, we've been doing Z to stop them".
That's not the kind of info you can disclose publicly since it tells attackers where you're vulnerable, if you're going to do this kind of thing you're going to have to make it a small circle.
Of 12 day care facilities affiliated with tech companies, six—that’s half—have below-average vaccination rates
As many have suggested, no duh.
according to the state’s data.... And those six have a level of measles vaccination that does not provide the “herd immunity” critical to the spread of the disease.
So that is legitimately worrying, if the anti-vax situation has gotten so bad that half the schools don't have herd immunity.
But it also suggests an incursion of anti-science, anti-vaccine thinking in one of the smartest regions on Earth.
It suggests the null-hypothesis, that one of the smartest regions on Earth is utterly typical in this respect.
A more telling stat was that in Q1 2003, Sun shipped 66,000 Sparc units, most of them Sun Fire servers, the commodity line. In Q3 of 2014, that number was down to no more than 7,000 units in the quarter. But he notes that while Oracle's unit sales are down, the devices it sells are very high-end and are fully configured and integrated with compute, storage, networking and software completely integrated.
That isn't a refutation of the claim that Sparc is dying, it's just an explanation of how it happens.
Sparc users are the same as any other group, the exodus starts with the fringe and then moves to the core. Casual low-profit customers found it easy to switch platforms so left a long time ago. The big high profit customers have high loyalty and massive sunk costs, it's hard for them to switch platforms so they'll be the last to go. If Sparc is dying then that's exactly the pattern I'd expect it to follow.
An interesting idea but I don't think it's practical.
Setting a pre-committed value for an asset like that is extremely difficult. Particularly if it's linked to a legitimate business that might grow rapidly in value.
The greater danger, according to this line of thought, lies in foods heavy with trans fats and saturated fats
Oh, for Pete's sake - they have a chance to fix a 40 year old error and are replacing it with a 20 year old error.
Yes, trans fats are the nasty but saturated fat is fine for you - that's been proven time and again over the past decade.
How foolish for the government to base nutrition advice on an insufficiently verified hypothesis!
The big problem for cardiac disease and cancer is sugar (specifically free fructose). It gets metabolized by the liver into triglycerides which make the blood vessels 'sticky' and promote the growth of atherlosclerotic plaque, and cancer eats it as a premium fuel.
All of my blood panels are markedly improved after making the switch myself. My combined cardiovascular risk score is down by about 50% in less than a year.
The "greater danger" is relying on the government to tell you what's good to eat. There are always competing interests and your health isn't more important than the corn lobby.
Everyone should follow my nutrition advice based on an insufficiently verified hypothesis!!
I agree that a certain level of fluff is essential, but some also comes from the language itself. Getters/setters are a great example, that's a lot of fluff that almost vanishes in a language like python without detracting from maintainability or stability. Errors are a more subtle example, what kinds of errors are possible given the language and API? At what level does the API want you to handle errors? How much code do you need to handle those errors properly? This can greatly influence the volume of necessary fluff.
I think the best choice might be none of the above. I listened to Larry Wilmore on WTF and he referred to Stewart as one of the best straight men in the business, and I think that's an important perspective. Jon Stewart is basically an advocate for the audience and the correspondents are usually his foils.
Colbert's foil character was strong enough that he was able to build a show around it, but the other two correspondents who went on to host were the ones who were able to flip the tables have Jon be the foil to their reasonable outsider perspective (Oliver as the Brit and Wilmore as a minority). I don't think any of the current correspondents aside from Williams are really doing the same, and even Jessica Williams still goes into caricature when doing non-racial reporting.
Bill Mahr could probably do it but he's a bit too controversial and he's a bit to eager to run out on things like anti-vax nonsense. The best bet is either giving one of the current correspondents a straight man role and seeing if they can pull it off, or taking a somewhat known and established comedian and giving them a go.
> If company goes bankrupt due to CEO's bad decisions, CEO will be able to live quite comfortably to the end of his life
if those bad decisions were in fact caused by the CEO there are plenty that can be (and is) done to punish them for poor performance. CEOs fired routinely.
Which costs them a ridiculous amount of money, leaving them with a ridiculous amount of money.
The higher up the totem pole you are the less you're hurt by being fired, both because you have more savings and because it's easier to find another job.
ultimately you have to look at it from a different perspective.
a CEO job isn't an entitlement. much like a surgeon. someone would have to walk a long hard and at times perilous career path. relatively few make it to the top of the piramid.
which makes for a limited pool of quality CEOs. supply-demand. simple as that.
market won't shell out money for no good reason. market does its job as long as its free. and,
btw, the opposite is very much true as well, the only way to check/balance prices (including labor) is free market.
Being a free market doesn't mean things work optimally. The bargaining power of CEO candidates (old boy networks included) mean they can afford to insulate themselves from the companies they run, diversified portfolios, golden parachutes, etc. The don't have enough skin in the game to really hurt when they screw up. It's also extremely difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of CEOs at their jobs. Sure you'll occasionally get a spectacular success like Steve Jobs but how do you evaluate high level decision making?
In addition to the well known nuclear waste issue and well proven dangers of plant meltdowns, you also have proliferation issues with rogue states claiming peaceful use, liberation of waist heat dumped to the environment
Rogue states are an issue (worst case they don't get any), but environmental concerns exist with renewables as well. Hydro can be very destructive, and the high cost of wind and solar implies that there's a lot of effort involved in manufacturing, deployment, and maintenance, that effort is unlikely to be carbon neutral.
and even after that, the more nuclear power you create, the more you get people used to unlimited power and the more their thirst for cheap fossil fuel power. The answer is conservation and population control, not escalation of generation.
If that's the answer than we might as well give up because it's not going to happen. Rewriting human nature is a fool's errand, if you want to make a positive difference find a way to work with human nature instead.
That type of research really does not seem like something Uber really has the resources for. Google has money to burn so they can have these kinds of pie in the sky research projects, but what has Uber really done from a technological perspective? A cell phone app and some centralized logistics? They did an ok job scaling, but it is still not that impressive of a technical accomplishment.
That being said, the idea of Uber running self driving cars is kinda scary. The company already has a reputation for skirting or ignoring laws/regulations and treats things like insurance as 'customer beware'. In fact their general attitude of 'look out for yourself' would speak to some potentially scary vehicle behavior settings.
I agree but I'm not sure the issue is so much money as organization.
Google has been doing high R&D, including AI, for ages. They have the teams of skilled people who know eachothers skills and know how to work together, they have the experience of taking abstract research projects and developing them into products. Uber at this point is mostly an app, they don't really have a lot of proven managers and technical leads, they can get there eventually, but I predict a few boondoggles first.
This is literally how enterprises operate right NOW. They pay a continual fee for OS upgrades and updates. Usually that means they could run the latest and greatest (e.g Windows 8:P ) but most stick to a single OS release for a long period because they want consistency and stability. Enterprises do not buy copies of Windows outright - they want support contracts.
But how would this new system fail? I.e. what about the outdated machine doing some simple job that no-one has bothered to upgrade (or no one wants to because they want an old OS to test against). Sure these forgotten boxes are poor practice, but I think they're pretty common, that seems like a lot of extra work for the IT dept to make sure that each copy of windows is properly registered and talking to the right license server.
A few years back I needed a compact Linux compatible mp3/ogg player and I bought one of their M3 music cards.
It was actually a decent little player, I probably would have bought a second after it died but they discontinued them so I switched to a SanDisk clip.
Still they were definitely trying to emulate the Apple aesthetic even back then, I was kinda surprised they weren't bigger.
One of the essential duties of government is to ensure a just and stable society, a limited degree of wealth redistribution is part of that process.
I dont disagree to a degree, but at what point do the middle class stand up and say enough is enough. no more welfare, make people work for the state if on welfare (there are jobs that the state does, and pays workers good money to do, but could be done for much less) be it picking up garbage o nthe freeways or parks or other jobs that need to be done. heck even make it so that if someone is good enough at what they are doing it can translate into a fulltime job with the state.
When I was unemployed i was suposed to be "looking for work" or I wouldnt get paid... well an excel spreadsheet with some adjustments to the dates fixed that real quick. why not actually put me to work if im gonna collect?
I've thought about that before, making the Government the employer of last resort, but I see two big problems.
1) There might not be enough grunt work available, so the government work will either be extremely inefficient (ie costing more money than just welfare) or push private companies out of business. Like any entitlement program there will also be an urge to improve working conditions and compensation until they're competitive with real jobs, at which point you've destroyed the original objective.
2) Following on that very few people like being unemployed which gives them motivation to find jobs. But that program will give people the illusion of gainful employment while taking up time they could use for a real job search. I suspect people in that program would spend a lot longer in these government fake-jobs than they would on welfare looking for regular jobs.
why do rich and poor people always get things for "free"??? Be it a rich guy who gets a goodie bag at an award show woth thousands of dollars such as at the grammys, Or giving the "poor" free food and electricity. All of this, on the backs of the actual hard working middle class. Its wrong, the government should not be taking money from X and giving it to Y
Why not? The idea that society achieves an optimal distribution of wealth on its own is ridiculous, adopting a perfect free market wouldn't make it any less so. One of the essential duties of government is to ensure a just and stable society, a limited degree of wealth redistribution is part of that process.
Indeed. Now do you understand how its so hard for those who are skeptical of mainstream climate science to come out of the closet?
Yes, and I do empathize.
Even when it isn't true, they are called shills for the oil industry, slandered, dragged through the mud and marginalized.
If you had a career and a family, would you take that risk?
Climate science isn't being politicized, it has been from the early 1980's.
So there's an important distinction. It is quite common for high profile climate skeptics to have a strong ideology that skews strongly right and is very pro-industry, particularly blue collar industries like oil, those biases are valid discussion points.
There's also a few who do have a financial stake in the oil industry or are even being paid by oil companies for their advocacy. Those should definitely be exposed.
But otherwise the criticism should focus on the substance. I think the major valid criticism is that they generally don't know what the hell they're talking about, and they are misunderstanding or misrepresenting basic things. But someone shouldn't be accused of being paid by oil companies unless there's evidence.
Are you trying to imply he's doing anything other then rent seeking? If you are you're doing a terrible job at it. How much money is this guy putting up? If the answer isn't "enough to buy his share of partial ownership" then the only thing he brings are the domains he's squatting on. To wit: rent seeking.
No, he's implying the OPs tactic for screwing him over wouldn't work (even if it were legal).
There is a well established way to deal with this problem in the case of real estate: property taxes based on assed value. This discourages people from holding onto something of value which they are not developing.
Explain, please, who has the relevant taxing authority for Internet 'property'?
The same organizations who control and sell the domains under the TLD to begin with. The problem isn't authority, it's valuation. It's really hard to assess the value of a domain.
Introduction of the lawsuit as an element of the scientific method is underway in the Land of the Formerly Free also. Michael Mann has sued columnist Mark Steyn for mocking the hockey-stick curve. I'm looking forward to passage of an amendment to the square-cube law that will allow a concrete block to fly.
Mark Steyn didn't mock the hockey-stick curve, he called it fraudulent. That's pretty clearly defamation.
Now in both cases it was more a case of the publishers implying that they thought there was malfeasance, rather than implying something had been proven, though I still think there's a case to be made for the lawsuits. In neither case was there any actual evidence of the wrongdoing that was implied, the articles were simply published with the intention of character assassination.
For the record, I'm neutral on climate. I trust the scientific method to come up with the truth. Greens, go ahead and force us to "believe" (another newly introduced element of the scientific method) in apocalyptic warming. Just don't get in our way when we build the new reactor fleet it will take to replace fossil fuels.
This has nothing to do with the scientific method. This is about protecting debate in the public sphere and I do think it protects it. Consider if you were a climate scientist with a completely impeccable record. How willing would you be to make some high profile statements on your research, knowing that powerful media interests would immediately start dragging your name through the mud and trying to turn you into a pariah and a magnet for crazies?
I guess it would depend on where you got the ad from. One of the forums I frequent has locally hosted, forum topic specific ads. There are vendors who pay for those spots and they're not blocked by the ad blocker. If you were doing that, someone would have to add your ads to the blocker filter for them to be filtered out.
The concern I have lies with the malware that's occasionally injected. I run the ad blocker so I'm not vulnerable.
The malware is a legitimate concern.
I will note that I make it a point to not click on ads, even on that forum, all that's happening is I'm getting an impression of the subject of the ad and no click-through revenue goes to you.
[John]
Why do you make it a point not to click on them? Malware avoidance or principle? I actually will try to click the Google search ads if they're useful.
Here's my fundamental issue with your position. For a huge portion of the internet ads are the only viable model, either director or disguised as native content (which is worse and harder to block). Unless someone makes a widespread mircopayment model universal adoption of ad-blockers would mean a ton of useful sites (/. and Google included) would shut down.
I think of it a bit like torrenting, there are times when it's understandable, but you're effectively leeching off the people who play by the rules. They're fundamentally unsustainable practices.
Got me. Not my job to figure out your business model.
Though you're apparently happy to rule out the standard business model.
I have several sites I've built for personal and use by others. None of them are generating money but that's not why I put them up.
That's irrelevant.
I've fixed my car for fun, I've grown food for fun, that doesn't mean I don't believe auto mechanism or farmers should work for free.
Should I start getting a bunch of traffic, I'd have to flip on some sort of nagging system and a request for voluntary payment then if it wasn't helping, install a block for mandatory payment. That would have people either pay to stay or go elsewhere and it won't be costing me money any more.
That's a valid business model for some kinds of sites where you build a strong personal relationship with the user and don't intend to scale. But for most others it's completely impractical.
What makes the information on your site valuable enough that you think you should be paid for it?
[John]
I think it's valuable enough that people will come to use it for the price of seeing a small unobtrusive ad. Why do I need more justification than that?
Slashdot Mirror
Apple has roughly 175 billion in cash and Tesla's current market cap is around 35B. If Apple wants to get into the car business might as well jump in feet first. Not to mention you get one of the greatest CEO visionaries Elon Musk, since Steve Jobs. The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Apple is building its one electric vehicle that resembles a minivan.
Why buy Tesla when you can hire them for a lot less:
Musk also said Apple has been trying to poach Tesla employees, offering $250,000 signing bonuses and 60 percent salary increases.
“Apple tries very hard to recruit from Tesla,” he said. “But so far they’ve actually recruited very few people.”
So is Apple making those offers because they think those employees are that valuable to Apple, or to Tesla?
The battery idea has some problems. Batteries are not interchangeable - age and quality matters. You might drive up to the station with a shiny new battery, get it replaced - and your new battery is two years old and only has half the effective capacity. Or worse, you might get given a battery which was previously damaged in an accident and is now prone to catch fire, or which a previous owner hacked to disable the under-voltage protection circuit and squeeze a bit more capacity from while ruining the cells, or which was manufactured by the cheapest factory in China with a counterfeir controller chip - all things that expose the station operator to liability. The only way it would work would be to inspect every battery as it came in and before sending it out again, which means every station needs a skilled attendant and frequently needs to buy new batteries. Expensive.
You own the car but the auto-maker owns the battery and automatically replaces bad batteries free of charge.
You go up to the charging station swap out the spent for the new, the spent goes to a charging station that runs a diagnostic during charging, if the battery fails the diagnostic the attendant sets it aside, then once a week they call the automaker who sends someone around to pick up the duds and drop off replacements.
Since owners don't need to buy replacement batteries there's less of a market for counterfeits, and if you can make the verification works the only extra labour is the weekly exchange.
Right? So don't hand them the phone. Hold it up so they can scan the QR code on the display. I don't hand my phone to the TSA Security guard validating my boarding pass, I just hold my phone over the scanner.
Fine in theory until the officer opens with "can you please hand me your phone so I can check your license information".
People have trouble saying no to completely unreasonable and unnecessary requests from cops, how many people do you think will start a police interaction by rejecting what sounds like a reasonable request for a standard procedure?
>. has failed to turn many of its innovations into new moneymakers.
It doesn't matter how many don't end up bringing major revenue. It only matters that a few do. Of Google+ is a complete failure and Android has 75% of the market, Google wins big. Their newsgroup site shuts down while Gmail huge is a huge success, Google does quite well.
They can well afford to invest $10 million each into trying ten different things if just one those goes on to make $250 million.
If Google becomes THE autonomous car company, it doesn't matter that they also experimented with ten other things that didn't bdo great - and even the ones that don't do great sometimes make a little money.
Google will not be the autonomous car company. all the major car companies have but researching self given cars since before Google existed, they are not going to use Google's system so they can data mine their customers. They will do that them selves.
Besides which the Google car is to limited, 25 MPH max (so far), not tested in heavy rain or snow, the need to map the roads down to the inch will slow down adoption too.
The same could be said of Tesla Motors.
Established car companies have a brand in that market to maintain. Google has no such burden, consumers have far lower expectations of a Google car and if it does fail it doesn't really affect Google's other offerings.
can firefox keywords take you directly to search results in youtube (!y), google images (!images), and dozens of others? I didn't think so. ddg #ftw.
They can if you set them up.
If I want to search youtube I just type 'y search phrase' into the URL bar, same with wikipedia, imdb, etc.
I think this is less the case of "we found a bug in package X" and more like "we've been getting a lot of attacks from phishing group Y, we've been doing Z to stop them".
That's not the kind of info you can disclose publicly since it tells attackers where you're vulnerable, if you're going to do this kind of thing you're going to have to make it a small circle.
Of 12 day care facilities affiliated with tech companies, six—that’s half—have below-average vaccination rates
As many have suggested, no duh.
according to the state’s data. ... And those six have a level of measles vaccination that does not provide the “herd immunity” critical to the spread of the disease.
So that is legitimately worrying, if the anti-vax situation has gotten so bad that half the schools don't have herd immunity.
But it also suggests an incursion of anti-science, anti-vaccine thinking in one of the smartest regions on Earth.
It suggests the null-hypothesis, that one of the smartest regions on Earth is utterly typical in this respect.
A more telling stat was that in Q1 2003, Sun shipped 66,000 Sparc units, most of them Sun Fire servers, the commodity line. In Q3 of 2014, that number was down to no more than 7,000 units in the quarter. But he notes that while Oracle's unit sales are down, the devices it sells are very high-end and are fully configured and integrated with compute, storage, networking and software completely integrated.
That isn't a refutation of the claim that Sparc is dying, it's just an explanation of how it happens.
Sparc users are the same as any other group, the exodus starts with the fringe and then moves to the core. Casual low-profit customers found it easy to switch platforms so left a long time ago. The big high profit customers have high loyalty and massive sunk costs, it's hard for them to switch platforms so they'll be the last to go. If Sparc is dying then that's exactly the pattern I'd expect it to follow.
An interesting idea but I don't think it's practical.
Setting a pre-committed value for an asset like that is extremely difficult. Particularly if it's linked to a legitimate business that might grow rapidly in value.
The greater danger, according to this line of thought, lies in foods heavy with trans fats and saturated fats
Oh, for Pete's sake - they have a chance to fix a 40 year old error and are replacing it with a 20 year old error.
Yes, trans fats are the nasty but saturated fat is fine for you - that's been proven time and again over the past decade.
How foolish for the government to base nutrition advice on an insufficiently verified hypothesis!
The big problem for cardiac disease and cancer is sugar (specifically free fructose). It gets metabolized by the liver into triglycerides which make the blood vessels 'sticky' and promote the growth of atherlosclerotic plaque, and cancer eats it as a premium fuel.
All of my blood panels are markedly improved after making the switch myself. My combined cardiovascular risk score is down by about 50% in less than a year.
The "greater danger" is relying on the government to tell you what's good to eat. There are always competing interests and your health isn't more important than the corn lobby.
Everyone should follow my nutrition advice based on an insufficiently verified hypothesis!!
I agree that a certain level of fluff is essential, but some also comes from the language itself. Getters/setters are a great example, that's a lot of fluff that almost vanishes in a language like python without detracting from maintainability or stability. Errors are a more subtle example, what kinds of errors are possible given the language and API? At what level does the API want you to handle errors? How much code do you need to handle those errors properly? This can greatly influence the volume of necessary fluff.
I think the best choice might be none of the above. I listened to Larry Wilmore on WTF and he referred to Stewart as one of the best straight men in the business, and I think that's an important perspective. Jon Stewart is basically an advocate for the audience and the correspondents are usually his foils.
Colbert's foil character was strong enough that he was able to build a show around it, but the other two correspondents who went on to host were the ones who were able to flip the tables have Jon be the foil to their reasonable outsider perspective (Oliver as the Brit and Wilmore as a minority). I don't think any of the current correspondents aside from Williams are really doing the same, and even Jessica Williams still goes into caricature when doing non-racial reporting.
Bill Mahr could probably do it but he's a bit too controversial and he's a bit to eager to run out on things like anti-vax nonsense. The best bet is either giving one of the current correspondents a straight man role and seeing if they can pull it off, or taking a somewhat known and established comedian and giving them a go.
> If company goes bankrupt due to CEO's bad decisions, CEO will be able to live quite comfortably to the end of his life
if those bad decisions were in fact caused by the CEO there are plenty that can be (and is) done to punish them for poor performance. CEOs fired routinely.
Which costs them a ridiculous amount of money, leaving them with a ridiculous amount of money.
The higher up the totem pole you are the less you're hurt by being fired, both because you have more savings and because it's easier to find another job.
ultimately you have to look at it from a different perspective.
a CEO job isn't an entitlement. much like a surgeon. someone would have to walk a long hard and at times perilous career path. relatively few make it to the top of the piramid.
which makes for a limited pool of quality CEOs. supply-demand. simple as that.
market won't shell out money for no good reason. market does its job as long as its free. and,
btw, the opposite is very much true as well, the only way to check/balance prices (including labor) is free market.
Being a free market doesn't mean things work optimally. The bargaining power of CEO candidates (old boy networks included) mean they can afford to insulate themselves from the companies they run, diversified portfolios, golden parachutes, etc. The don't have enough skin in the game to really hurt when they screw up. It's also extremely difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of CEOs at their jobs. Sure you'll occasionally get a spectacular success like Steve Jobs but how do you evaluate high level decision making?
In addition to the well known nuclear waste issue and well proven dangers of plant meltdowns, you also have proliferation issues with rogue states claiming peaceful use, liberation of waist heat dumped to the environment
Rogue states are an issue (worst case they don't get any), but environmental concerns exist with renewables as well. Hydro can be very destructive, and the high cost of wind and solar implies that there's a lot of effort involved in manufacturing, deployment, and maintenance, that effort is unlikely to be carbon neutral.
and even after that, the more nuclear power you create, the more you get people used to unlimited power and the more their thirst for cheap fossil fuel power. The answer is conservation and population control, not escalation of generation.
If that's the answer than we might as well give up because it's not going to happen. Rewriting human nature is a fool's errand, if you want to make a positive difference find a way to work with human nature instead.
That type of research really does not seem like something Uber really has the resources for. Google has money to burn so they can have these kinds of pie in the sky research projects, but what has Uber really done from a technological perspective? A cell phone app and some centralized logistics? They did an ok job scaling, but it is still not that impressive of a technical accomplishment.
That being said, the idea of Uber running self driving cars is kinda scary. The company already has a reputation for skirting or ignoring laws/regulations and treats things like insurance as 'customer beware'. In fact their general attitude of 'look out for yourself' would speak to some potentially scary vehicle behavior settings.
I agree but I'm not sure the issue is so much money as organization.
Google has been doing high R&D, including AI, for ages. They have the teams of skilled people who know eachothers skills and know how to work together, they have the experience of taking abstract research projects and developing them into products. Uber at this point is mostly an app, they don't really have a lot of proven managers and technical leads, they can get there eventually, but I predict a few boondoggles first.
This is literally how enterprises operate right NOW. They pay a continual fee for OS upgrades and updates. Usually that means they could run the latest and greatest (e.g Windows 8 :P ) but most stick to a single OS release for a long period because they want consistency and stability. Enterprises do not buy copies of Windows outright - they want support contracts.
But how would this new system fail? I.e. what about the outdated machine doing some simple job that no-one has bothered to upgrade (or no one wants to because they want an old OS to test against). Sure these forgotten boxes are poor practice, but I think they're pretty common, that seems like a lot of extra work for the IT dept to make sure that each copy of windows is properly registered and talking to the right license server.
A few years back I needed a compact Linux compatible mp3/ogg player and I bought one of their M3 music cards.
It was actually a decent little player, I probably would have bought a second after it died but they discontinued them so I switched to a SanDisk clip.
Still they were definitely trying to emulate the Apple aesthetic even back then, I was kinda surprised they weren't bigger.
One of the essential duties of government is to ensure a just and stable society, a limited degree of wealth redistribution is part of that process.
I dont disagree to a degree, but at what point do the middle class stand up and say enough is enough. no more welfare, make people work for the state if on welfare (there are jobs that the state does, and pays workers good money to do, but could be done for much less) be it picking up garbage o nthe freeways or parks or other jobs that need to be done. heck even make it so that if someone is good enough at what they are doing it can translate into a fulltime job with the state.
When I was unemployed i was suposed to be "looking for work" or I wouldnt get paid... well an excel spreadsheet with some adjustments to the dates fixed that real quick. why not actually put me to work if im gonna collect?
I've thought about that before, making the Government the employer of last resort, but I see two big problems.
1) There might not be enough grunt work available, so the government work will either be extremely inefficient (ie costing more money than just welfare) or push private companies out of business. Like any entitlement program there will also be an urge to improve working conditions and compensation until they're competitive with real jobs, at which point you've destroyed the original objective.
2) Following on that very few people like being unemployed which gives them motivation to find jobs. But that program will give people the illusion of gainful employment while taking up time they could use for a real job search. I suspect people in that program would spend a lot longer in these government fake-jobs than they would on welfare looking for regular jobs.
why do rich and poor people always get things for "free"??? Be it a rich guy who gets a goodie bag at an award show woth thousands of dollars such as at the grammys, Or giving the "poor" free food and electricity. All of this, on the backs of the actual hard working middle class. Its wrong, the government should not be taking money from X and giving it to Y
Why not? The idea that society achieves an optimal distribution of wealth on its own is ridiculous, adopting a perfect free market wouldn't make it any less so. One of the essential duties of government is to ensure a just and stable society, a limited degree of wealth redistribution is part of that process.
Indeed. Now do you understand how its so hard for those who are skeptical of mainstream climate science to come out of the closet?
Yes, and I do empathize.
Even when it isn't true, they are called shills for the oil industry, slandered, dragged through the mud and marginalized.
If you had a career and a family, would you take that risk?
Climate science isn't being politicized, it has been from the early 1980's.
So there's an important distinction. It is quite common for high profile climate skeptics to have a strong ideology that skews strongly right and is very pro-industry, particularly blue collar industries like oil, those biases are valid discussion points.
There's also a few who do have a financial stake in the oil industry or are even being paid by oil companies for their advocacy. Those should definitely be exposed.
But otherwise the criticism should focus on the substance. I think the major valid criticism is that they generally don't know what the hell they're talking about, and they are misunderstanding or misrepresenting basic things. But someone shouldn't be accused of being paid by oil companies unless there's evidence.
Are you trying to imply he's doing anything other then rent seeking? If you are you're doing a terrible job at it. How much money is this guy putting up? If the answer isn't "enough to buy his share of partial ownership" then the only thing he brings are the domains he's squatting on. To wit: rent seeking.
No, he's implying the OPs tactic for screwing him over wouldn't work (even if it were legal).
There is a well established way to deal with this problem in the case of real estate: property taxes based on assed value. This discourages people from holding onto something of value which they are not developing.
Explain, please, who has the relevant taxing authority for Internet 'property'?
The same organizations who control and sell the domains under the TLD to begin with. The problem isn't authority, it's valuation. It's really hard to assess the value of a domain.
Introduction of the lawsuit as an element of the scientific method is underway in the Land of the Formerly Free also. Michael Mann has sued columnist Mark Steyn for mocking the hockey-stick curve. I'm looking forward to passage of an amendment to the square-cube law that will allow a concrete block to fly.
Mark Steyn didn't mock the hockey-stick curve, he called it fraudulent. That's pretty clearly defamation.
Now in both cases it was more a case of the publishers implying that they thought there was malfeasance, rather than implying something had been proven, though I still think there's a case to be made for the lawsuits. In neither case was there any actual evidence of the wrongdoing that was implied, the articles were simply published with the intention of character assassination.
For the record, I'm neutral on climate. I trust the scientific method to come up with the truth. Greens, go ahead and force us to "believe" (another newly introduced element of the scientific method) in apocalyptic warming. Just don't get in our way when we build the new reactor fleet it will take to replace fossil fuels.
This has nothing to do with the scientific method. This is about protecting debate in the public sphere and I do think it protects it. Consider if you were a climate scientist with a completely impeccable record. How willing would you be to make some high profile statements on your research, knowing that powerful media interests would immediately start dragging your name through the mud and trying to turn you into a pariah and a magnet for crazies?
I guess it would depend on where you got the ad from. One of the forums I frequent has locally hosted, forum topic specific ads. There are vendors who pay for those spots and they're not blocked by the ad blocker. If you were doing that, someone would have to add your ads to the blocker filter for them to be filtered out.
The concern I have lies with the malware that's occasionally injected. I run the ad blocker so I'm not vulnerable.
The malware is a legitimate concern.
I will note that I make it a point to not click on ads, even on that forum, all that's happening is I'm getting an impression of the subject of the ad and no click-through revenue goes to you.
[John]
Why do you make it a point not to click on them? Malware avoidance or principle? I actually will try to click the Google search ads if they're useful.
Here's my fundamental issue with your position. For a huge portion of the internet ads are the only viable model, either director or disguised as native content (which is worse and harder to block). Unless someone makes a widespread mircopayment model universal adoption of ad-blockers would mean a ton of useful sites (/. and Google included) would shut down.
I think of it a bit like torrenting, there are times when it's understandable, but you're effectively leeching off the people who play by the rules. They're fundamentally unsustainable practices.
Got me. Not my job to figure out your business model.
Though you're apparently happy to rule out the standard business model.
I have several sites I've built for personal and use by others. None of them are generating money but that's not why I put them up.
That's irrelevant.
I've fixed my car for fun, I've grown food for fun, that doesn't mean I don't believe auto mechanism or farmers should work for free.
Should I start getting a bunch of traffic, I'd have to flip on some sort of nagging system and a request for voluntary payment then if it wasn't helping, install a block for mandatory payment. That would have people either pay to stay or go elsewhere and it won't be costing me money any more.
That's a valid business model for some kinds of sites where you build a strong personal relationship with the user and don't intend to scale. But for most others it's completely impractical.
What makes the information on your site valuable enough that you think you should be paid for it?
[John]
I think it's valuable enough that people will come to use it for the price of seeing a small unobtrusive ad. Why do I need more justification than that?