From what I've been able to piece together online, it looks like Uber might be in serious trouble. Google apparently really started to suspect something was wrong when one of the LiDAR component providers noticed both companies were sourcing the same parts with Uber apparently using virtually identical circuit board layouts. The timing looks bad as well with the the small startup company being immediately bought up by Uber and sudden development of Self-Driving technology. Plus you're talking about a company who knowingly tested their Self-Driving cars on the street without bothering to purchase a licence to do so. Even if Uber gets off scott free there's this entire question of Patents too which Google probably entirely holds...
Like most major cities I imagine cars cause a great deal of air pollution and noise. An electric or even a hybrid I imagine would help that situation as less oil burned means less localized pollution which does a great deal of harm.
I'm not sure if it's intentional but wouldn't "Zenefits" translate to "Zero Benefits"? to most folks? Why would anyone want to hire a company called that? Also I seem to recall when you start your company name with "Z" you often end up at the end of the phone book so there's potential that you're doing accounting fraud or something questionable so you want to be the last company folks call? Anyhow, wierd...
I think maybe this problem is due to the novelty effect where it seems really cool to try it out a few times but after a while it doesn't seem like it makes life easier. Let's say you voice activate your lights despite having a light switch. I'm going to guess most of us have the light switch memorized so we'd hit it on and off even without looking or in the dark so changing to a voice activated system would likely slow you down. If you look at systems like Nest, they roughly figure out when you're home or not and then automatically adjust the heat and cooling to suit you. I'm sure the novelty would wear off if you had to tell it every time.
What they really need is "star trek" like sliding doors when it knows what you need before you even realize it. That would be awesome.
Interesting article, it pretty much explains why regular taxi service employees are so against Uber. When you have a competitor that undercuts the service so much that you need to live out of your car in a parking lot, it's somewhat hard to make a living from it.
I've owned a Chevy Volt for over 3 years now. In the warmer summer months, (I'm in Canada), the small battery supplies pretty much 100% of all my power needs. In the winter or if I decide to go long distance once a year, it switches to gas usage seamlessly. It's really too bad folks see it only as EV or only as gas. It's essentially both without compromise. So you charge it when you don't want to use gas and you can use gas when you need the distance or heat.
Personally for sound quality I would stick with CD or FLAC format digital file. They are both digital, zero compression and sound great assuming they were mastered properly and you're playing them on good quality speakers. If your speakers are of poor quality or you've lost your high frequency hearing with age, good luck telling the difference.
I can understand the attraction to tape or vinyl formats however. They have a physical aspect which folks also like. It is neat to see a tape load and play or to listen to a record with your amplifier turned off. (The needle actually vibrates loud enough to hear if you listen carefully.) It's like having a steam powered car. It would be fun to play with but not too practical. So just because it's a dated or less than perfect format doesn't mean folks don't have an interest in it.
Despite them not succeeding, you have to give them credit for at least refunding folks compared to other epic failures on Kickstarter. In the last year, we've also seen the number of consumer drones skyrocket leading to more "accidents" so maybe the market is starting to saturate.
Although there's a limit to how fast a battery can be charged before it overheats and explodes or simply damages itself, don't forget that there's a practical limit to how much power you can realistically draw from a typical house outlet. A Gallon of gasoline is estimated to have 33.41 KwH! (A normal gas engine throws a good portion of that energy away as heat.) That gallon of gas is pretty close to what my typical household uses in the entire day for electricity! So to pull down the equivalent of a couple of gallons of gas in 20 minutes is going to take the equivalent power drain of a sub-station transformer. It's why you don't see a commercial fast Tesla charger at home. A typical house doesn't use a 480 volt industrial power feed. You don't want much more current in the hands of consumers. A small mistake could cause a nasty explosion / arc.
LCD panels are already very cheap to produce and are virtually as thin as OLED panels. In fact OLED panels are so similar to LCDs that some manufacturers have come up with the stupid idea of curving them so that they're easier to market to consumers because we can barely tell the difference. (Completely distorts the image)
My major concern with OLED is burn-in which apparently is possible in OLEDs, I haven't seen that in my Samsung phone but it's still a concern compared to LCDs. If I'm going to pay several grand for a TV it better be almost bulletproof. And 4K TV's are just silly, it's very hard to find 1080p content (most commercial TV is only 1080i at best) nevermind 4K.
Samsung is a gigantic company with its hand in hundreds of products. The unfortunately Note 7 incident won't be enough to sink the entire company. They're so diverse that even a non-Samsung brand phone may have Samsung parts. And some of their products like their SSD have been outright stellar compared to the competition for performance and value. So yes a small bump in the road for the Samsung bus, not a house swallowing sinkhole.
To help protect our future and environment, we generally need to cut back a bit on consumption. China has a much greater population than Canada and the United States combined so of course they are a massive Greenhouse contributor. Not only that but a lot of the things they produce aren't even for themselves but for us since their own population is not yet wealthy enough to buy all the luxuries they can get their hand on if any. While it's great that they're trying to cut back, it's embarrassing for us if we can't match or exceed what they're doing. It's like being stuck on a lifeboat with 5 people and one person is eating the equivalent of 4 other person's rations and to have that one person ask why everyone else can't cut back on one ration like they did.
So we need someone like Trump to convince people that electric vehicles work? Pretty sad when you think about it considering I've driven a Volt for 3 years and it's been a great car. Ironic isn't it. What's next, Trump says global warming is real and suddenly everyone who's a climate denier changes?
I've read about the science from reputable sources and I have somewhat of a science background myself but even if I didn't believe in that, my own common sense suggests that it's more than likely that climate change is real. Why would I think that? We're burning millions of tonnes of fossil fuels everyday that nature has locked away in our planet for millions of years. Fossil Fuels in nature isn't remotely being produced at the same rate, our entire human species hasn't even remotely been around that long and somehow out of some miracle releasing that much carbon into the atmosphere by some miracle isn't have some effect? It's like saying oh well I'll just cut down the whole forest, it grows back right, no loss? The amount of energy Fossil Fuels release is incredible, I'm sure you've heard or thought of the expression you can't move mountains. Well the truth is we can and we do, thanks to this "cheap" energy, our mining equipment can actually move mountains. The problem is nothing is truly "cheap", there's always a cost even if we can't directly see it.
I also dislike the folks who panic and say the world is ending. The world isn't going to end with climate change but it's going to get expensive and uncomfortable for us. For my city it already has, they've had to spend millions for upgrading the storm sewer system to deal with a massive increase in nasty downpours in the last few years to hopefully prevent flooding and while yes I'm sure we've had this sort of flash flooding before, I've lived here long enough to notice that it seems to be an increasing trend. No amount of no it's not happening is going to save folks from being flooded. It's ended up putting the city in debt but no one thinks of it that way. All folks argue about is how taxes are going up.
Actually the Hydrogen Blimps used in the World War were notoriously difficult to shoot down. The planes that eventually pulled it off were using explosive / incendiary rounds to pull it off. Regular bullets just wizz right through leaving holes. Nevermind the fact that firing your gun in the air in a populated area (this kind of distribution only really is effective in a city.) is probably going to get you in trouble. Nowadys they don't use hydrogen in Blimps. The Hindenberg mostly went up in a fireball because the shell was made of flamable material, not so much the gas.
The drones might be shootable but the problem there is they'll have cameras that will likely spot you and it's not like you randomly shoot at aircraft right?
Sort of, from what I've seen it's pretty hard to prevent attacks especially if the attacker is suicidal. It seems that a lot of these folks use the easiest least common denominator way of doing attacks. Can't get a gun, use a pressure cooker. Can't even get that use a truck... In the grand scheme of things a lot of these folks are trying to get publicity on the news which the media does indirectly help but I don't see how that will ever change. Well unless we want the government to start covering up all incidents as "accidents".
Well despite all the jokes, admittedly doing anything in space is difficult and prone to failure even on systems that are "proven". Due to a programming failure, the European Mars lander ended up as a crater instead of landing and that's not the first Mars lander to mess up and probably not the last. Putting stuff into orbit sometimes doesn't even make it off the ground (SpaceX, Orbital Sciences).
So does that mean it also "predicted" that it would kill that driver who slammed into a transport at high speed? Maybe it needs a "You are about to die!" indicator too! =D In all seriousness thou, this isn't a very good way to explain results. Imagine if you were selling a parachute... Well it worked great that one time out of a few hundred. Telsa's super-cruise system may be fairly advanced but it probably isn't something to entirely trust your life on. After all airbags and seatbelts have saved countless but we don't see an article praising how well it works.
I admit chances are it's probably easier for Steam to just pay the fine unless the Auz market is worth less than I thought too but it would be interesting to see what would happen if Steam decided to fight. I suspect gamers would be the ones hit in the crosshairs. Auz could effectively block Steam but that would result in their games becoming unplayable and a whole lot of gamers getting angry.
The US has a very pro-US president now (Trump) for better or worse who's plan is to be super pro-US when he comes into power in a few months. I think we'd see International agreements scrapped pretty quickly.
So it'll be interesting to see what Steam decides to do.
Almost dying at the south pole, check! XD Seriously thou I don't see a problem with the US burning taxpayer's money to bring the guy back. He's an inspiring explorer for more than one generation. Hopefully he isn't among the last (for space), and it seems like he's not going to stop exploring till he can't do it anymore.
I've always found it fascinating that folks accuse China of generating the most greenhouse gasses and while yes by absolute number of people they probably do that's the worst interpretation of statistics ever. China has a LOT of people, if you believe in equality everyone should have the same chance at the standard of living as everyone else. The problem is that we're a very rich country, so per capita alone we generate per person more emissions than a typical Chinese citizen. We use more resources than a typical counterpart in China. (A lot of the stuff that China produces is sold to us.) and so on. It's like a billionaire asking why they can pay a tax of a 1/2 million dollars as pocket change while that would financially bankrupt the average citizen. As the leading country and the wealthiest we need to contribute a bigger share because it will technically hurt us per person less. If we don't how would we expect someone who might not be able to contribute without literally dying to give up a part of their share?
And it is a problem. Climate change is likely to hit poorer countries first, and when conditions are unsustainable, who's door do you think they'll come knocking on first? If you're the one with all the food and everyone else is starving to death, it doesn't matter if you're armed, you're in deep trouble if you don't share. And it's not like we can't share, we do actually have enough for everyone. It's just, it's hard to give up luxury.
I honestly don't think this solution will work for a couple of important issues. First of all you don't even need a Drone to do a drop. Any RC plane could do it in a flyby. Also there's no reason why you need GPS to operate a drone although it makes it simpler. A drone could be hacked quite easily. Ontop of that not all drone manufacturers are in the UK and there's no reason why anyone outside of the UK would go through the trouble of enforcing these guidelines. Plus there's the problem of how to maintain all that data. Although prisons don't move very often, imagine how would you update all those devices if your prison did move.
Better solution, mount an EMP gun on the roof and shoot them down. (I imagine a prison should be a no-fly zone anyhow.) Or maybe even a sharpshooter with a real rifle. Or maybe the prison should fly their own defensive drones?
I remember reading that sometimes exercise extends your life for the same period as doing the exercise. So in a sense yes, you could live longer but at the same time it's not really anymore time especially if you don't like exercising. So if playing Pokemon Go is fun and enjoyable for you and it extends your life by the same amount, that's pretty much a win win in my book. Note, I'm not a Pokemon Go player myself (don't want a dataplan on my cellphone) but I don't find Pokemon Go players on average annoying, just amusing. If it makes you happy and you live longer, that can't be a bad thing right?
One of the huge concerns especially if you look at xkcd's representation of the development of modern man and civilization vs Temperature is that the arrival of modern man and the development of civilizations occurred at a relatively flat plateau in temperature. It's uncertain if we'll be able to thrive as well if the temperature shoots up beyond this plateau which we seem to be rapidly accomplishing. I'm not saying we'll completely die out or anything but if you look at that graph a few degrees below average temperature and we're in the last ice age where most of north america is uninhabitable! The US and Canada wouldn't really exist as countries. Who knows what a few degrees above that will accomplish?
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From what I've been able to piece together online, it looks like Uber might be in serious trouble. Google apparently really started to suspect something was wrong when one of the LiDAR component providers noticed both companies were sourcing the same parts with Uber apparently using virtually identical circuit board layouts. The timing looks bad as well with the the small startup company being immediately bought up by Uber and sudden development of Self-Driving technology. Plus you're talking about a company who knowingly tested their Self-Driving cars on the street without bothering to purchase a licence to do so. Even if Uber gets off scott free there's this entire question of Patents too which Google probably entirely holds...
Like most major cities I imagine cars cause a great deal of air pollution and noise. An electric or even a hybrid I imagine would help that situation as less oil burned means less localized pollution which does a great deal of harm.
I'm not sure if it's intentional but wouldn't "Zenefits" translate to "Zero Benefits"? to most folks? Why would anyone want to hire a company called that? Also I seem to recall when you start your company name with "Z" you often end up at the end of the phone book so there's potential that you're doing accounting fraud or something questionable so you want to be the last company folks call? Anyhow, wierd...
I think maybe this problem is due to the novelty effect where it seems really cool to try it out a few times but after a while it doesn't seem like it makes life easier. Let's say you voice activate your lights despite having a light switch. I'm going to guess most of us have the light switch memorized so we'd hit it on and off even without looking or in the dark so changing to a voice activated system would likely slow you down. If you look at systems like Nest, they roughly figure out when you're home or not and then automatically adjust the heat and cooling to suit you. I'm sure the novelty would wear off if you had to tell it every time.
What they really need is "star trek" like sliding doors when it knows what you need before you even realize it. That would be awesome.
Interesting article, it pretty much explains why regular taxi service employees are so against Uber. When you have a competitor that undercuts the service so much that you need to live out of your car in a parking lot, it's somewhat hard to make a living from it.
I've owned a Chevy Volt for over 3 years now. In the warmer summer months, (I'm in Canada), the small battery supplies pretty much 100% of all my power needs. In the winter or if I decide to go long distance once a year, it switches to gas usage seamlessly. It's really too bad folks see it only as EV or only as gas. It's essentially both without compromise. So you charge it when you don't want to use gas and you can use gas when you need the distance or heat.
Personally for sound quality I would stick with CD or FLAC format digital file. They are both digital, zero compression and sound great assuming they were mastered properly and you're playing them on good quality speakers. If your speakers are of poor quality or you've lost your high frequency hearing with age, good luck telling the difference.
I can understand the attraction to tape or vinyl formats however. They have a physical aspect which folks also like. It is neat to see a tape load and play or to listen to a record with your amplifier turned off. (The needle actually vibrates loud enough to hear if you listen carefully.) It's like having a steam powered car. It would be fun to play with but not too practical. So just because it's a dated or less than perfect format doesn't mean folks don't have an interest in it.
Despite them not succeeding, you have to give them credit for at least refunding folks compared to other epic failures on Kickstarter. In the last year, we've also seen the number of consumer drones skyrocket leading to more "accidents" so maybe the market is starting to saturate.
Although there's a limit to how fast a battery can be charged before it overheats and explodes or simply damages itself, don't forget that there's a practical limit to how much power you can realistically draw from a typical house outlet. A Gallon of gasoline is estimated to have 33.41 KwH! (A normal gas engine throws a good portion of that energy away as heat.) That gallon of gas is pretty close to what my typical household uses in the entire day for electricity! So to pull down the equivalent of a couple of gallons of gas in 20 minutes is going to take the equivalent power drain of a sub-station transformer. It's why you don't see a commercial fast Tesla charger at home. A typical house doesn't use a 480 volt industrial power feed. You don't want much more current in the hands of consumers. A small mistake could cause a nasty explosion / arc.
LCD panels are already very cheap to produce and are virtually as thin as OLED panels. In fact OLED panels are so similar to LCDs that some manufacturers have come up with the stupid idea of curving them so that they're easier to market to consumers because we can barely tell the difference. (Completely distorts the image)
My major concern with OLED is burn-in which apparently is possible in OLEDs, I haven't seen that in my Samsung phone but it's still a concern compared to LCDs. If I'm going to pay several grand for a TV it better be almost bulletproof. And 4K TV's are just silly, it's very hard to find 1080p content (most commercial TV is only 1080i at best) nevermind 4K.
Samsung is a gigantic company with its hand in hundreds of products. The unfortunately Note 7 incident won't be enough to sink the entire company. They're so diverse that even a non-Samsung brand phone may have Samsung parts. And some of their products like their SSD have been outright stellar compared to the competition for performance and value. So yes a small bump in the road for the Samsung bus, not a house swallowing sinkhole.
To help protect our future and environment, we generally need to cut back a bit on consumption. China has a much greater population than Canada and the United States combined so of course they are a massive Greenhouse contributor. Not only that but a lot of the things they produce aren't even for themselves but for us since their own population is not yet wealthy enough to buy all the luxuries they can get their hand on if any. While it's great that they're trying to cut back, it's embarrassing for us if we can't match or exceed what they're doing. It's like being stuck on a lifeboat with 5 people and one person is eating the equivalent of 4 other person's rations and to have that one person ask why everyone else can't cut back on one ration like they did.
So we need someone like Trump to convince people that electric vehicles work? Pretty sad when you think about it considering I've driven a Volt for 3 years and it's been a great car. Ironic isn't it. What's next, Trump says global warming is real and suddenly everyone who's a climate denier changes?
I've read about the science from reputable sources and I have somewhat of a science background myself but even if I didn't believe in that, my own common sense suggests that it's more than likely that climate change is real. Why would I think that? We're burning millions of tonnes of fossil fuels everyday that nature has locked away in our planet for millions of years. Fossil Fuels in nature isn't remotely being produced at the same rate, our entire human species hasn't even remotely been around that long and somehow out of some miracle releasing that much carbon into the atmosphere by some miracle isn't have some effect? It's like saying oh well I'll just cut down the whole forest, it grows back right, no loss? The amount of energy Fossil Fuels release is incredible, I'm sure you've heard or thought of the expression you can't move mountains. Well the truth is we can and we do, thanks to this "cheap" energy, our mining equipment can actually move mountains. The problem is nothing is truly "cheap", there's always a cost even if we can't directly see it.
I also dislike the folks who panic and say the world is ending. The world isn't going to end with climate change but it's going to get expensive and uncomfortable for us. For my city it already has, they've had to spend millions for upgrading the storm sewer system to deal with a massive increase in nasty downpours in the last few years to hopefully prevent flooding and while yes I'm sure we've had this sort of flash flooding before, I've lived here long enough to notice that it seems to be an increasing trend. No amount of no it's not happening is going to save folks from being flooded. It's ended up putting the city in debt but no one thinks of it that way. All folks argue about is how taxes are going up.
Actually the Hydrogen Blimps used in the World War were notoriously difficult to shoot down. The planes that eventually pulled it off were using explosive / incendiary rounds to pull it off. Regular bullets just wizz right through leaving holes. Nevermind the fact that firing your gun in the air in a populated area (this kind of distribution only really is effective in a city.) is probably going to get you in trouble. Nowadys they don't use hydrogen in Blimps. The Hindenberg mostly went up in a fireball because the shell was made of flamable material, not so much the gas.
The drones might be shootable but the problem there is they'll have cameras that will likely spot you and it's not like you randomly shoot at aircraft right?
Sort of, from what I've seen it's pretty hard to prevent attacks especially if the attacker is suicidal. It seems that a lot of these folks use the easiest least common denominator way of doing attacks. Can't get a gun, use a pressure cooker. Can't even get that use a truck... In the grand scheme of things a lot of these folks are trying to get publicity on the news which the media does indirectly help but I don't see how that will ever change. Well unless we want the government to start covering up all incidents as "accidents".
Well despite all the jokes, admittedly doing anything in space is difficult and prone to failure even on systems that are "proven". Due to a programming failure, the European Mars lander ended up as a crater instead of landing and that's not the first Mars lander to mess up and probably not the last. Putting stuff into orbit sometimes doesn't even make it off the ground (SpaceX, Orbital Sciences).
So does that mean it also "predicted" that it would kill that driver who slammed into a transport at high speed? Maybe it needs a "You are about to die!" indicator too! =D In all seriousness thou, this isn't a very good way to explain results. Imagine if you were selling a parachute... Well it worked great that one time out of a few hundred. Telsa's super-cruise system may be fairly advanced but it probably isn't something to entirely trust your life on. After all airbags and seatbelts have saved countless but we don't see an article praising how well it works.
I admit chances are it's probably easier for Steam to just pay the fine unless the Auz market is worth less than I thought too but it would be interesting to see what would happen if Steam decided to fight. I suspect gamers would be the ones hit in the crosshairs. Auz could effectively block Steam but that would result in their games becoming unplayable and a whole lot of gamers getting angry.
The US has a very pro-US president now (Trump) for better or worse who's plan is to be super pro-US when he comes into power in a few months. I think we'd see International agreements scrapped pretty quickly.
So it'll be interesting to see what Steam decides to do.
Unless Valve has branches in Austrailia, I wonder how they intend to collect the fine if Steam decides not to pay up?
Almost dying at the south pole, check! XD Seriously thou I don't see a problem with the US burning taxpayer's money to bring the guy back. He's an inspiring explorer for more than one generation. Hopefully he isn't among the last (for space), and it seems like he's not going to stop exploring till he can't do it anymore.
I've always found it fascinating that folks accuse China of generating the most greenhouse gasses and while yes by absolute number of people they probably do that's the worst interpretation of statistics ever. China has a LOT of people, if you believe in equality everyone should have the same chance at the standard of living as everyone else. The problem is that we're a very rich country, so per capita alone we generate per person more emissions than a typical Chinese citizen. We use more resources than a typical counterpart in China. (A lot of the stuff that China produces is sold to us.) and so on. It's like a billionaire asking why they can pay a tax of a 1/2 million dollars as pocket change while that would financially bankrupt the average citizen. As the leading country and the wealthiest we need to contribute a bigger share because it will technically hurt us per person less. If we don't how would we expect someone who might not be able to contribute without literally dying to give up a part of their share?
And it is a problem. Climate change is likely to hit poorer countries first, and when conditions are unsustainable, who's door do you think they'll come knocking on first? If you're the one with all the food and everyone else is starving to death, it doesn't matter if you're armed, you're in deep trouble if you don't share. And it's not like we can't share, we do actually have enough for everyone. It's just, it's hard to give up luxury.
I honestly don't think this solution will work for a couple of important issues. First of all you don't even need a Drone to do a drop. Any RC plane could do it in a flyby. Also there's no reason why you need GPS to operate a drone although it makes it simpler. A drone could be hacked quite easily. Ontop of that not all drone manufacturers are in the UK and there's no reason why anyone outside of the UK would go through the trouble of enforcing these guidelines. Plus there's the problem of how to maintain all that data. Although prisons don't move very often, imagine how would you update all those devices if your prison did move.
Better solution, mount an EMP gun on the roof and shoot them down. (I imagine a prison should be a no-fly zone anyhow.) Or maybe even a sharpshooter with a real rifle. Or maybe the prison should fly their own defensive drones?
I remember reading that sometimes exercise extends your life for the same period as doing the exercise. So in a sense yes, you could live longer but at the same time it's not really anymore time especially if you don't like exercising. So if playing Pokemon Go is fun and enjoyable for you and it extends your life by the same amount, that's pretty much a win win in my book. Note, I'm not a Pokemon Go player myself (don't want a dataplan on my cellphone) but I don't find Pokemon Go players on average annoying, just amusing. If it makes you happy and you live longer, that can't be a bad thing right?
One of the huge concerns especially if you look at xkcd's representation of the development of modern man and civilization vs Temperature is that the arrival of modern man and the development of civilizations occurred at a relatively flat plateau in temperature. It's uncertain if we'll be able to thrive as well if the temperature shoots up beyond this plateau which we seem to be rapidly accomplishing. I'm not saying we'll completely die out or anything but if you look at that graph a few degrees below average temperature and we're in the last ice age where most of north america is uninhabitable! The US and Canada wouldn't really exist as countries. Who knows what a few degrees above that will accomplish?