My understanding from how movie theatres work is that they barely make any money at all from the showing of movies. It is the production studios that take the greatest amount of profits from the movies shown at the theatre. Where theatre's make money is primarily from the extremely unhealthy food folks buy at the theatre. It's why we hear so much about movies from producers that flop because that represents a huge loss. Theatres are not so worried so long as folks still go to the theatre to see movies.
Gas stations use a similar model where most of their actual profits are from non-gas sales. They behave very much like a corner store. The gas that's sold isn't very profitable otherwise.
Just about all modern cellphones use a lithium polymer battery which will potentially explode or catch on fire if you damage / bend or drop the phone hard enough. If you've ever watched gizmoslip on youtube you'll notice that even iphones will get dangerously hot if you drop them hard enough. From what I heard the Note 7 had a failure rate of about 1/1000 which means even if you get something out of the bad batch the chance of it exploding is somewhat rare. Unfortunately this brings with it a lot of bad publicity and it probably won't be cheap for Samsung to replace all the bad phones.
That's NOT an accurate comparison! In fact you cannot compare the two. The google system lets you pick a destination and the car will drive you there without intervention. Many owners who have tested Telsa's system have said you need to pay attention to what it's doing or you could potentially die like that one driver who sadly trusted it enough to watch a movie. The systems are so different on levels of automation it'd be like saying there's more miles on cruise control. Read up and learn the difference.
I remember an article years ago of a D-Link router where they cheaped out and left out a filtering capacitor. An engineer figured this out because hilariously they left the solder pads on the actual circuit boards so a fix was to solder in your own filtering capacitor. The missing capacitor resulted in the power supply being noisy and eventually corrupting ram which would lead to the router crashing. D-Link of course in their brilliance figured the quick fix was to reboot your router every 15 minutes, stable connection be dammed. This wasn't even a bright decision in the long run because I imagine all the tech support calls would have killed whatever savings that single part meant.
At the end of the day folks, buy a good reliable router that works with opensource firmware. (I prefer shibby tomato.) and almost never experience problems again.
It's hard to have complete faith in this report because technically if you accidentally crush a phone with a lithium battery or you somehow manage to punch a hole into it, there's always the risk of it exploding or catching on fire. Samsung likely wants the phone to ensure they're not being blamed for something they are not responsible for. With the number of Samsung 7 owners in China having one or two explode from consumer mis-use or accidents isn't entirely surprising. I recall a few years ago a student blew himself up with an ipod after he accidentally put a screwdriver through the battery trying to fix it.
As processes improve large scale projects such as factories and power generation tend to get more efficient as predicted but it's hard to get the same economies of scale on smaller systems like cars. It's death by millions and millions of cuts instead of by one massive blow. I'm sort of contributing by owning a Volt and have managed to go gas free for most of spring, all of summer and fall until winter when it switches over to inefficient gas engine because it needs the waste heat. To be honest thou, I never entirely went with the Volt to save gas even thou it does as a bonus. EV's are just incredibly smooth cars to drive and lack of engine noise is really nice. Hopefully more folks realize the Volt is a good option and EV's become more popular.
I actually use SD cards with a proper USB reader as a USB Stick because when the cards become too small to be useful, they get re-purposed for something else instead of going into the trash. Also you are slightly less likely to destroy the data on it if you manage to break the USB reader unlike a USB Stick which I've seen folks snap off which requires some decent soldering skills to fix. A 1TB card would be pretty cool.
On the downside thou what's this crazy 1TB SD card going to cost? I can't imagine it's going to be cheap.
I own a VPC-Z11 ultralight Sony Vaio back when Sony was still custom producing them in Japan and the US. They're awesome laptops (thou really expensive.) The laptop was manufactured back in 2010 and six years later I have almost no degradation in the battery despite leaving it plugged in all the time. The laptop has a charge only to 50% feature to help protect the battery and it seems to have worked. So doing something similar in a cellphone makes sense. The problem will be predicting when you need more power or less.
I wouldn't be entirely surprised if what went wrong had more to do with refueling than the rocket itself. The whole process of transferring fuel into a rocket is extremely dangerous especially with liquid oxygen. Guess we'll know soon...
I have to admit I have no interest in this phone as my Note 3 still works perfectly fine but at the very least at least Samsung is making sure that they don't earn the reputation for their phone being faulty or explosive. So it's hard to say if this is really good or bad.
Although it's amazing that you can produce thrust without a mass output it doesn't seem to be very efficient at doing it considering the amount of energy expended vs the thrust generated. Laser pushed spaceships have been theoretically possible but the megawatt lasers and precision focusing required have made the technology largely impractical. It does however warrant more research to see if the technology can be improved and understood. (If it's actually a real effect.) Otherwise other than being a scientific oddity, it's not very useful.
Batteries are generally extremely heavy in their weight to energy ratio compared to gasoline. They also cost a fair bit of money and take a while to charge if you manage to drain that huge of a battery. Even your regular 240v home outlet could take a while. At some point aside from bragging rights it becomes impractical to have a battery that big. The Volt only has about a 40 mile battery and I've made it through the entire summer without having to resort to gas on my daily trips. I've even forgotten to plug the thing in at times and it still had enough. Granted I live in a small city so that helps but I can't see what having past 200 miles gains for you. It might be a bit easier for cross-country trips if you're hopping supercharger stations but I have a bad feeling that you're paying a huge amount in extra weight and costs for that minuscule usage situation. (Unless driving hundreds of miles a day is normal for you.)
I don't think folks on the market were idiots, at some point due to market hype some folks hopped on hoping to ride the wave and to jump before it crashed. I think a lot of folks knew that it was way overvalued but decided to buy into it in the hopes to catch the wave. Some high speed trading systems that caught it early probably managed to make some decent money before it started to collapse again.
I work for a small city Telco (Tbaytel) in Canada. We're one of the few left in Canada created when the original founders of our city ended up disliking Bell and ended up covering a large area of NorthWest Ontario. Internet here is actually pretty good at reasonable rates and completely without download or upload limits. The only real limitation is speed depending on service but otherwise it's a reasonably good service. The competition between Tbaytel and the National Telco's is fierce but it has resulted in better services and savings I believe. The city owns the telco so a fair chunk of profits goes back to our community. So yes, it isn't impossible to have a provider that's partially government / commercial that isn't a complete rip-off to consumers.
Actually this isn't too hard to figure out why. Keep in mind two things, first the rockets are launched over ocean to make sure that if they do crash, they hopefully just land in the empty sea where they won't bother anyone. Second think of it like throwing a ball. To get it into high orbit you need a lot of forward momentum to keep it up there. You can't just throw it straight up because then it'll just fall back to earth or escape earth's gravity into deep space. It needs to be an arc. When shooting it into high orbit, the rocket's already gone so far offshore that it would take far too much fuel to return back to land so it's easier to let it fall in an arc onto a drone ship at sea. When going into low orbit there doesn't need to be so much forward momentum so it isn't as far offshore so it can return back to land. Another way to picture this, if the rocket simply cut out when it finished boosting the payload where would it end up without any assistance.
It's for cases like this that Google has decided that "Self-Driving" should be an all or nothing affair. The failure from what I read was the self-driving system was unable to tell the difference between the white transport truck and white overcast sky which is understandable. AI Optical Recognition systems are not perfect, heck even as humans we're prone to "optical illusions" so there's NO way a self-driving system using cameras is going to work 100% flawlessly. Granted from the speed this guy had the system set to and the fact he was watching Harry Potter is just asking for trouble. Google's system uses a LiDAR scanner which is an extremely expensive sensor system that Tesla doesn't have and isn't really found on production vehicles. Without that I wouldn't trust my life on an optical camera system only. This isn't a fault of the system but the fault of someone who doesn't understand the technology sadly.
I think it's hard for a lot of folks to see both sides of the picture. I've worked both "crappy" jobs at a call center all the way up to a programmer for a telecom. There are times I wonder if I get paid way too much for doing so little work as a programmer compared to the crazy non-stop work as a call center agent. And while the call center job was a lot of work it always impressed me how some folks could handle that job happily and make thing seem a lot better. While sometimes my very well paid co-workers in telecom would complain about ridiculous things. I think some of those folks despite that crazy life style are having fun. They're pushing their abilities to the limits and accomplishing more than a lot of folks are. It's sometimes nice to be able to focus on one thing and to give it your all in life. Also letting your workers nap is a good thing. They've shown a 15 minute nap can double productivity. If I was the boss I'd encourage it. Life is a lot of things to different people for some it's anything but work but for some it is work. So either way, I wouldn't see it as bad necessarily.
In Canada anyhow, wired Internet is both tremendously faster and cheaper too especially in my area with FIOS and unlimited packages. All mobile packages are expensive and charged per MByte. A good workaround is to connect to your friend's wifi points or to the numerous free wifi points found all over the city. While in theory I could afford mobile Internet why waste the price of home Internet for extremely limited service.
I think a part of the problem with USB-C is that it can handle up to 100 watts of power delivery! If your cable is of questionable quality or has issues, messing up 100 watts of power can definitely break things or cause a fire. I think amazon decided to go the safer route instead of destroying equipment or causing fires.
I still find it odd that a lot of folks considering an EV completely forget about the Volt. The new 2016 model has about 50 miles of range on pure electricity and switches over to gas when you run out completely eliminating any range anxiety or need to wait for the car to charge. In actual practice, I have the older 2013 model and so far it has served me well for years now. I end up running completely gas free summers and only burn gas in the depths of winter or when I decide to make a cross-country trip. It's also cheaper than the Model 3 Tesla. So cheaper, virtually no limitations. (Works like an EV if you don't drive too far and works like a hybrid when you do.) I would think that it'd be a no-brainer for a lot of folks.
Actually, I own a Volt and I live in Canada. The Volt is much cheaper and has a large enough battery that will make it electric for most average trips. I've gone whole summers without gas. Best of all when you actually do want to go cross-country you have a gas engine to make the trip. Personally I wouldn't trade my Volt for a pure EV, it's far more flexible.
The way this is explained isn't entirely clear to your average folk. I suspect folks are going to think that the fact that arctic ice isn't decreasing is a sign that everything is alright and that global warming is not a problem but it is much bigger than that. Each year arctic ice the size of a country melts in a cycle that refreezes in the winter. The cold freshwater melt is heavier than the surrounding seawater and sinks straight to the bottom starting many of the worldwide ocean currents. If this cycle gets disrupted or changed in some way it has a massive effect on worldwide climate. These currents drive many weather patterns such as rain, hurricanes, dry spells and heatwaves and cold snaps. What this article is suggesting is that the warm currents from equator might not reach the arctic resulting in the arctic getting colder and the equator getting hotter which will inevitably change entirely how our regional climate works. When something like this happens it results in entire weather systems such as monsoon rains which we're use to moving to different places on the planet. This usually isn't a good thing.
I've always admired OLEDs based screens for their colour accuracy and amazing flatness. With falling costs they would actually make the perfect display. Unfortunately, I am not sure if they resolved the issue of the pixels gradually burning out especially when it comes to blue leaving you with a yellow screen over the long term. It might not matter so much in a phone which typically arn't used more than a few years but that's not something you would want in a TV or monitor.
To be honest this wasn't entirely a surprise, wireless I have to admit is very convenient thou and well as they say there's a fine balance between convenience and security. On the other hand a lot of modern cars feature systems such as OnStar which means your vehicle can be tracked or disabled by the manufacturer so they're not exactly the most ideal cars to try to steal.
And no, these keys are encrypted but the problem is they're using a "range-extender" to make make it seem like your key is right next to the car when in reality it is a fair distance away.
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My understanding from how movie theatres work is that they barely make any money at all from the showing of movies. It is the production studios that take the greatest amount of profits from the movies shown at the theatre. Where theatre's make money is primarily from the extremely unhealthy food folks buy at the theatre. It's why we hear so much about movies from producers that flop because that represents a huge loss. Theatres are not so worried so long as folks still go to the theatre to see movies.
Gas stations use a similar model where most of their actual profits are from non-gas sales. They behave very much like a corner store. The gas that's sold isn't very profitable otherwise.
Just about all modern cellphones use a lithium polymer battery which will potentially explode or catch on fire if you damage / bend or drop the phone hard enough. If you've ever watched gizmoslip on youtube you'll notice that even iphones will get dangerously hot if you drop them hard enough. From what I heard the Note 7 had a failure rate of about 1/1000 which means even if you get something out of the bad batch the chance of it exploding is somewhat rare. Unfortunately this brings with it a lot of bad publicity and it probably won't be cheap for Samsung to replace all the bad phones.
That's NOT an accurate comparison! In fact you cannot compare the two. The google system lets you pick a destination and the car will drive you there without intervention. Many owners who have tested Telsa's system have said you need to pay attention to what it's doing or you could potentially die like that one driver who sadly trusted it enough to watch a movie. The systems are so different on levels of automation it'd be like saying there's more miles on cruise control. Read up and learn the difference.
I remember an article years ago of a D-Link router where they cheaped out and left out a filtering capacitor. An engineer figured this out because hilariously they left the solder pads on the actual circuit boards so a fix was to solder in your own filtering capacitor. The missing capacitor resulted in the power supply being noisy and eventually corrupting ram which would lead to the router crashing. D-Link of course in their brilliance figured the quick fix was to reboot your router every 15 minutes, stable connection be dammed. This wasn't even a bright decision in the long run because I imagine all the tech support calls would have killed whatever savings that single part meant.
At the end of the day folks, buy a good reliable router that works with opensource firmware. (I prefer shibby tomato.) and almost never experience problems again.
It's hard to have complete faith in this report because technically if you accidentally crush a phone with a lithium battery or you somehow manage to punch a hole into it, there's always the risk of it exploding or catching on fire. Samsung likely wants the phone to ensure they're not being blamed for something they are not responsible for. With the number of Samsung 7 owners in China having one or two explode from consumer mis-use or accidents isn't entirely surprising. I recall a few years ago a student blew himself up with an ipod after he accidentally put a screwdriver through the battery trying to fix it.
As processes improve large scale projects such as factories and power generation tend to get more efficient as predicted but it's hard to get the same economies of scale on smaller systems like cars. It's death by millions and millions of cuts instead of by one massive blow. I'm sort of contributing by owning a Volt and have managed to go gas free for most of spring, all of summer and fall until winter when it switches over to inefficient gas engine because it needs the waste heat. To be honest thou, I never entirely went with the Volt to save gas even thou it does as a bonus. EV's are just incredibly smooth cars to drive and lack of engine noise is really nice. Hopefully more folks realize the Volt is a good option and EV's become more popular.
I actually use SD cards with a proper USB reader as a USB Stick because when the cards become too small to be useful, they get re-purposed for something else instead of going into the trash. Also you are slightly less likely to destroy the data on it if you manage to break the USB reader unlike a USB Stick which I've seen folks snap off which requires some decent soldering skills to fix. A 1TB card would be pretty cool.
On the downside thou what's this crazy 1TB SD card going to cost? I can't imagine it's going to be cheap.
I own a VPC-Z11 ultralight Sony Vaio back when Sony was still custom producing them in Japan and the US. They're awesome laptops (thou really expensive.) The laptop was manufactured back in 2010 and six years later I have almost no degradation in the battery despite leaving it plugged in all the time. The laptop has a charge only to 50% feature to help protect the battery and it seems to have worked. So doing something similar in a cellphone makes sense. The problem will be predicting when you need more power or less.
I wouldn't be entirely surprised if what went wrong had more to do with refueling than the rocket itself. The whole process of transferring fuel into a rocket is extremely dangerous especially with liquid oxygen. Guess we'll know soon...
I have to admit I have no interest in this phone as my Note 3 still works perfectly fine but at the very least at least Samsung is making sure that they don't earn the reputation for their phone being faulty or explosive. So it's hard to say if this is really good or bad.
Although it's amazing that you can produce thrust without a mass output it doesn't seem to be very efficient at doing it considering the amount of energy expended vs the thrust generated. Laser pushed spaceships have been theoretically possible but the megawatt lasers and precision focusing required have made the technology largely impractical. It does however warrant more research to see if the technology can be improved and understood. (If it's actually a real effect.) Otherwise other than being a scientific oddity, it's not very useful.
Batteries are generally extremely heavy in their weight to energy ratio compared to gasoline. They also cost a fair bit of money and take a while to charge if you manage to drain that huge of a battery. Even your regular 240v home outlet could take a while. At some point aside from bragging rights it becomes impractical to have a battery that big. The Volt only has about a 40 mile battery and I've made it through the entire summer without having to resort to gas on my daily trips. I've even forgotten to plug the thing in at times and it still had enough. Granted I live in a small city so that helps but I can't see what having past 200 miles gains for you. It might be a bit easier for cross-country trips if you're hopping supercharger stations but I have a bad feeling that you're paying a huge amount in extra weight and costs for that minuscule usage situation. (Unless driving hundreds of miles a day is normal for you.)
I don't think folks on the market were idiots, at some point due to market hype some folks hopped on hoping to ride the wave and to jump before it crashed. I think a lot of folks knew that it was way overvalued but decided to buy into it in the hopes to catch the wave. Some high speed trading systems that caught it early probably managed to make some decent money before it started to collapse again.
I work for a small city Telco (Tbaytel) in Canada. We're one of the few left in Canada created when the original founders of our city ended up disliking Bell and ended up covering a large area of NorthWest Ontario. Internet here is actually pretty good at reasonable rates and completely without download or upload limits. The only real limitation is speed depending on service but otherwise it's a reasonably good service. The competition between Tbaytel and the National Telco's is fierce but it has resulted in better services and savings I believe. The city owns the telco so a fair chunk of profits goes back to our community. So yes, it isn't impossible to have a provider that's partially government / commercial that isn't a complete rip-off to consumers.
Actually this isn't too hard to figure out why. Keep in mind two things, first the rockets are launched over ocean to make sure that if they do crash, they hopefully just land in the empty sea where they won't bother anyone. Second think of it like throwing a ball. To get it into high orbit you need a lot of forward momentum to keep it up there. You can't just throw it straight up because then it'll just fall back to earth or escape earth's gravity into deep space. It needs to be an arc. When shooting it into high orbit, the rocket's already gone so far offshore that it would take far too much fuel to return back to land so it's easier to let it fall in an arc onto a drone ship at sea. When going into low orbit there doesn't need to be so much forward momentum so it isn't as far offshore so it can return back to land. Another way to picture this, if the rocket simply cut out when it finished boosting the payload where would it end up without any assistance.
It's for cases like this that Google has decided that "Self-Driving" should be an all or nothing affair. The failure from what I read was the self-driving system was unable to tell the difference between the white transport truck and white overcast sky which is understandable. AI Optical Recognition systems are not perfect, heck even as humans we're prone to "optical illusions" so there's NO way a self-driving system using cameras is going to work 100% flawlessly. Granted from the speed this guy had the system set to and the fact he was watching Harry Potter is just asking for trouble. Google's system uses a LiDAR scanner which is an extremely expensive sensor system that Tesla doesn't have and isn't really found on production vehicles. Without that I wouldn't trust my life on an optical camera system only. This isn't a fault of the system but the fault of someone who doesn't understand the technology sadly.
Single sheet of glass huh? I'm not sure that's a good way to describe how you'd want a phone. Hopefully it doesn't break like a single sheet of glass!
I think it's hard for a lot of folks to see both sides of the picture. I've worked both "crappy" jobs at a call center all the way up to a programmer for a telecom. There are times I wonder if I get paid way too much for doing so little work as a programmer compared to the crazy non-stop work as a call center agent. And while the call center job was a lot of work it always impressed me how some folks could handle that job happily and make thing seem a lot better. While sometimes my very well paid co-workers in telecom would complain about ridiculous things. I think some of those folks despite that crazy life style are having fun. They're pushing their abilities to the limits and accomplishing more than a lot of folks are. It's sometimes nice to be able to focus on one thing and to give it your all in life. Also letting your workers nap is a good thing. They've shown a 15 minute nap can double productivity. If I was the boss I'd encourage it. Life is a lot of things to different people for some it's anything but work but for some it is work. So either way, I wouldn't see it as bad necessarily.
In Canada anyhow, wired Internet is both tremendously faster and cheaper too especially in my area with FIOS and unlimited packages. All mobile packages are expensive and charged per MByte. A good workaround is to connect to your friend's wifi points or to the numerous free wifi points found all over the city. While in theory I could afford mobile Internet why waste the price of home Internet for extremely limited service.
I think a part of the problem with USB-C is that it can handle up to 100 watts of power delivery! If your cable is of questionable quality or has issues, messing up 100 watts of power can definitely break things or cause a fire. I think amazon decided to go the safer route instead of destroying equipment or causing fires.
I still find it odd that a lot of folks considering an EV completely forget about the Volt. The new 2016 model has about 50 miles of range on pure electricity and switches over to gas when you run out completely eliminating any range anxiety or need to wait for the car to charge. In actual practice, I have the older 2013 model and so far it has served me well for years now. I end up running completely gas free summers and only burn gas in the depths of winter or when I decide to make a cross-country trip. It's also cheaper than the Model 3 Tesla. So cheaper, virtually no limitations. (Works like an EV if you don't drive too far and works like a hybrid when you do.) I would think that it'd be a no-brainer for a lot of folks.
Actually, I own a Volt and I live in Canada. The Volt is much cheaper and has a large enough battery that will make it electric for most average trips. I've gone whole summers without gas. Best of all when you actually do want to go cross-country you have a gas engine to make the trip. Personally I wouldn't trade my Volt for a pure EV, it's far more flexible.
The way this is explained isn't entirely clear to your average folk. I suspect folks are going to think that the fact that arctic ice isn't decreasing is a sign that everything is alright and that global warming is not a problem but it is much bigger than that. Each year arctic ice the size of a country melts in a cycle that refreezes in the winter. The cold freshwater melt is heavier than the surrounding seawater and sinks straight to the bottom starting many of the worldwide ocean currents. If this cycle gets disrupted or changed in some way it has a massive effect on worldwide climate. These currents drive many weather patterns such as rain, hurricanes, dry spells and heatwaves and cold snaps. What this article is suggesting is that the warm currents from equator might not reach the arctic resulting in the arctic getting colder and the equator getting hotter which will inevitably change entirely how our regional climate works. When something like this happens it results in entire weather systems such as monsoon rains which we're use to moving to different places on the planet. This usually isn't a good thing.
I've always admired OLEDs based screens for their colour accuracy and amazing flatness. With falling costs they would actually make the perfect display. Unfortunately, I am not sure if they resolved the issue of the pixels gradually burning out especially when it comes to blue leaving you with a yellow screen over the long term. It might not matter so much in a phone which typically arn't used more than a few years but that's not something you would want in a TV or monitor.
To be honest this wasn't entirely a surprise, wireless I have to admit is very convenient thou and well as they say there's a fine balance between convenience and security. On the other hand a lot of modern cars feature systems such as OnStar which means your vehicle can be tracked or disabled by the manufacturer so they're not exactly the most ideal cars to try to steal.
And no, these keys are encrypted but the problem is they're using a "range-extender" to make make it seem like your key is right next to the car when in reality it is a fair distance away.