The nice thing about autonomous vehicles is that they could provide a comfortable, useful middle ground between public transport and private car ownership: autonomous cars on demand, autonomous taxicabs or minivans where you’ll often share a ride with someone else, but all providing point to pint transport at a reasonable price. Putting an AI driver on a large bus driving a fixed route might drive ticket costs down a little but won’t do much to make public transport more attractive in general.
Good point, and one of the issues I have with Android devices is the craptastic update policies many vendors have. Another one is that Apple seems to do a much better job of keeping malware out of the App Store. Apple doesn't get everything wrong, and by the same token Google doesn't get everything right. But a lot of the available peripheral services and devices for Android just seem to be of higher quality. And there's a reason for that. Google is in the data business and all of those services are potential profit centers for them; it makes sense to invest in them. For Apple, they are cost centers. But they seem to have forgotten that they are still necessary underpinnings of their core business.
The problem is not only in tax rates, but in the fact that tax laws have loopholes that allow profits to be shifted to countries where that profit is only lightly taxed. In it's simplest form a company will shift all of its IP to a tax haven, then charge all of its national subsidiaries a license fee for the use of that IP, in order to reduce their profits close to zero. Many, many companies do this.
The supercharger V3 is going to 256 kW. Cars can this rate only for 10 minutes or so.
That's 43kWh, good for 300km or so. Not bad on a 10 minute charge. Plus, every minute you shave off a top-up charge brings you closer to the current petrol experience. 10 minutes still constitutes a wait, but if you get that down to 7 it's more like a regular stop at the petrol pump. Hook up, visit the restroom, grab something from the forecourt shop, and by the time you're back the car is ready for the road. In Europe, a few companies are already upgrading CCS charging stations to 175kW, with a few at 350kW, even if there's not that many cars that can take advantage of that yet. Because that's where the future is.
“Assisting sales”, financing phones, or even dramatically lowering their profit margins is in itself not enough to arrest the decline of market share. Apple needs to offer compelling reasons for us to not buy Android, the mobile OS that everyone else is using. Switching between OSes is a giant pain in the rear, so they have some leeway there, but if Apple hardware, their OS, their services and integration with other services start to lag behind, people will switch and likely not come back. Having a walled garden is a liability if you do not take good care of it: most people (myself included) know the walls are there but we cannot see them for all the lovely trees in the garden, but Apple hasn’t been watering and trimming them very well lately, and things are starting to look a little shabby. And there are a couple of very good Android phones out there these days; time perhaps to move to greener pastures.
Google seems to better understand how to care for their ecosystem, not just the core OS but all the services around it: mapping, translation, voice recognition, and so on, all top of the bill stuff. Apple’s services are also-rans. If Apple doesn’t keep up innovation and doesn’t invest some of that vast capital into making their ecosystem the very best, sales will decline. And that means Apple will decline as a tech company. Even with billions in the bank. Same as the guy down the street running a video rental store; he made a killing back in the 80s and saved enough to comfortably retire on, but he keeps the doors to his shop open. Good for him, but I wouldn’t exactly consider him a relevant factor in local commerce.
Their suspicion of the bots being rigged has some merit. The EU runs a small bureau to (manually) combat fake news in a similar manner, but it has been caught out for being wrong about several news items. And it looks like it wasn’t a case of honest mistakes, but politically motivated spin.
These bots can be an awesome tool to achieve the same on a grand scale. Simply teach them to sniff out discussions about truths you want suppressed, and have the bots chime in with carefully crafted official narrative (thruthiness)
Nothing drags me back faster than a frickin' advert and a reminder about real money in the real world.
I don't like to be reminded too much about virtual assets in the virtual world either. Too much grind required to progress. Oh, grind can be fine if it's sort of optional, in longer games sometimes I do like to do something a bit mindless and get sidetracked, as long as I can get out of it when I want to. But take Battlefield 5. Fine shooter. But then they added all these "seasonal" objectives you have to complete in order to unlock new weapons (and more skins, yay). Kill 4 guys with a headshot in 1 round, do that much damage with RPGs, etc... and the game suddenly turned into a bloody chore, into work. Got seriously fed up with the game for a bit... until I figured the new weapons were kind of meh anyway, and just ignoring the "3 days left to complete campaign X" messages, and jumping in and play the game on my own terms. Which is still fun.
"The granting [of] patents inflames cupidity, excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits...The principle of the law from which such consequences flow cannot be just." The Economist, in 1851.
Some oil companies are already putting up charging points at petrol stations. Just another selling point to get more people to frequent their forecourt stores.
And of course it makes sense for automakers to invest in 3rd party charging networks and help speed deployment, but buying bonds or shares is not the same as "paying for it" and getting directly involved in the actual operation of these charging networks, like Tesla is doing.
Tesla has around 450 charging locations (each w/ multiple charging points) across Europe. There are currently over 6000 CCS charging locations. Admittedly most of those are still the relatively slow 50kW variants, but now that we finally see EVs hitting the market for which superfast charging makes sense, it's expected that many of these locations will be upgraded to 175/350kW in the near future. Up till now, the Tesla car was the only game in town for long distance driving, and the market for fast chargers for other brands simply wasn't there, but with this Volvo as well as the new long range models from Hyundai, BMW, VW, Jaguar and others, that's going to change.
TFA correctly states who cares most about the current cryptocurrencies: speculators. That's probably 97% of the trading volume. Then there's 1% people dealing in dodgy crap, 1% people paying for semi-dodgy crap (like anonymous payments for a VPN), and 1% actual mainstream transactions. In other words: pretty much no normal person gives a crap about cryptocurrencies. What they do care about is sending money quickly, safely and cheaply to friends or shops. PayPal does that, and I expect that the WhatsApp coin will actually not be all that different from using PayPal. Except that FB will get to see all of your transactions.
How much is that $68k in today's dollars? How much did your first car set you back? And how much were you making?
Also, EVs are expensive to buy but very cheap to run.
The Renault Zoe is around €26,000 ex VAT, with a range of 300+ km. The Hyundai Ioniq is around the same price with slightly less range. There are plenty of EV's for a lot less money, but with considerably less range.
Most car makers choose to NOT solve this issue like Tesla does: building a proprietary charging network. Instead they choose to rely on standard CCS charging stations that are already spreading all over Europe. So far there aren't many CCS fast charging stations (at 175 - 350 kW) comparable to Tesla's chargers in Europe, but the number is growing: over here there's already almost as many of them as there are Tesla chargers.
The future is clearly a fast charging network relying on 1 or 2 standards, supporting - and open to - all auto brands. The Tesla stations over here are already fitted with CCS leads but are not available to non-Tesla drivers. This is an issue that will solve itself; Tesla is considering opening up those stations to other brands, and in some countries they may be forced to by law when operating in public areas, especially on highways. BWM would never get the permits to build gas stations exclusively for BWM drivers, and while Tesla was considered to be a special case being a pioneer with proprietary charging tech, that privilege will end at some point.
Tesla clearly led the charge and built the new infrastructure needed for their cars from scratch, an admirable effort. But it is beyond silly at this stage to expect other auto makers to do the same.
The friend doesn't own the content, he merely has a subscription to stream it. And I bet the terms & conditions have something to say about when and where sharing that stream is allowed; generally that only includes members of one household, or a limited number of devices. That's not an unreasonable limitation.
I got a Doorbird instead. Is it more secure than the Ring? Doubtful. But it can run off the cloud if you want it to, with a little effort. The camera stream is available as RTSP, and the video intercom function supports SIP. My Doorbird is firewalled and talks to a home DVR system and Asterisk server. Same functionality, off the cloud, and will keep working if the company goes the way of the dodo.
A great movie of all time should at least age well. Perhaps a movie should be at least, say, 10 years old before being even considered for that list. My guess is that in 10 years, Black Panther and Blackkklansman will be more or less forgotten.
It’s hard enough these days to find so called developers who can read a query plan, but I suppose you should be thankful they understand what an index is.
Badly written book, and I couldn't get through the 50 page monologue at the end.
The book has its issues (those monologues are certainly part of that), but I still enjoyed the story. And I was interested in some of the ideas behind it; when and where I was growing up it was extremely unlikely to come across such ideas - not just the full on libertarian ones but also her more mainstream notions - in books, on TV or in class. So while I never bought into Rand's philosophy, I daresay her books have influenced some of my views.
The book is supposed to be high literature to some (it isn’t, though I did enjoy reading it). But I’ll doubt you will find many people - even amongst the more staunch Rand fans - who enjoyed that trilogy train wreck. But perhaps you confused Atlas Shrugged with the Fountainhead, another Rand book turned into a (much better) movie.
Is that really the norm these days? I had one run-in with a US cop but that was ages ago: he pulled me over for running a 4 way stop (red blinking traffic light, I didn't even know what the hell that meant, and assumed it was the same as blinking yellow). It was the middle of the night on a quiet street, but the cop didn't seem overly concerned for his safety. No guns, no shouting, just a polite chat (and he let me off with a warning).
Pretty much what I'd expect of a normal cop. But then again I suppose the same could happen over here. Our cops generally do not pull out their guns unless there is an immediate and clear threat, but if the call comes down about armed suspects fleeing the scene and an ANPR matches the plate, you better believe that they will take similar precautions i.e. take cover and order the driver out of the car at gunpoint.
Out of curiosity: what kind of sites? As I said I ran into only one and that was a news site (not a major outfit either). Others pointed out a similar experience in this thread, and the only other blocked sites I was able to find are news sites as well, many with identical "access blocked" notices. What's up with that? Maybe this: "Specifically, the two media groups whose newspapers are blocking EU traffic are Tronc, Inc. and Lee Enterprises, which between them own some 77 American news titles, plus a handful of assorted magazines and websites." (source. The rest of that article is fairly interesting)
I wonder if this means even more will join ?
I hope that eventually more countries will adopt a similar law, as it appears they might.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes them asshats.
The nice thing about autonomous vehicles is that they could provide a comfortable, useful middle ground between public transport and private car ownership: autonomous cars on demand, autonomous taxicabs or minivans where you’ll often share a ride with someone else, but all providing point to pint transport at a reasonable price. Putting an AI driver on a large bus driving a fixed route might drive ticket costs down a little but won’t do much to make public transport more attractive in general.
Good point, and one of the issues I have with Android devices is the craptastic update policies many vendors have. Another one is that Apple seems to do a much better job of keeping malware out of the App Store. Apple doesn't get everything wrong, and by the same token Google doesn't get everything right. But a lot of the available peripheral services and devices for Android just seem to be of higher quality. And there's a reason for that. Google is in the data business and all of those services are potential profit centers for them; it makes sense to invest in them. For Apple, they are cost centers. But they seem to have forgotten that they are still necessary underpinnings of their core business.
Such people
You're being generous...
The problem is not only in tax rates, but in the fact that tax laws have loopholes that allow profits to be shifted to countries where that profit is only lightly taxed. In it's simplest form a company will shift all of its IP to a tax haven, then charge all of its national subsidiaries a license fee for the use of that IP, in order to reduce their profits close to zero. Many, many companies do this.
The supercharger V3 is going to 256 kW. Cars can this rate only for 10 minutes or so.
That's 43kWh, good for 300km or so. Not bad on a 10 minute charge. Plus, every minute you shave off a top-up charge brings you closer to the current petrol experience. 10 minutes still constitutes a wait, but if you get that down to 7 it's more like a regular stop at the petrol pump. Hook up, visit the restroom, grab something from the forecourt shop, and by the time you're back the car is ready for the road. In Europe, a few companies are already upgrading CCS charging stations to 175kW, with a few at 350kW, even if there's not that many cars that can take advantage of that yet. Because that's where the future is.
“Assisting sales”, financing phones, or even dramatically lowering their profit margins is in itself not enough to arrest the decline of market share. Apple needs to offer compelling reasons for us to not buy Android, the mobile OS that everyone else is using. Switching between OSes is a giant pain in the rear, so they have some leeway there, but if Apple hardware, their OS, their services and integration with other services start to lag behind, people will switch and likely not come back. Having a walled garden is a liability if you do not take good care of it: most people (myself included) know the walls are there but we cannot see them for all the lovely trees in the garden, but Apple hasn’t been watering and trimming them very well lately, and things are starting to look a little shabby. And there are a couple of very good Android phones out there these days; time perhaps to move to greener pastures.
Google seems to better understand how to care for their ecosystem, not just the core OS but all the services around it: mapping, translation, voice recognition, and so on, all top of the bill stuff. Apple’s services are also-rans. If Apple doesn’t keep up innovation and doesn’t invest some of that vast capital into making their ecosystem the very best, sales will decline. And that means Apple will decline as a tech company. Even with billions in the bank. Same as the guy down the street running a video rental store; he made a killing back in the 80s and saved enough to comfortably retire on, but he keeps the doors to his shop open. Good for him, but I wouldn’t exactly consider him a relevant factor in local commerce.
Stupid technocrats and their toys
That's progress. In 10 years time it will be "Stupid Luddites and their insistence to drive themselves, putting the rest of us in danger"
Their suspicion of the bots being rigged has some merit. The EU runs a small bureau to (manually) combat fake news in a similar manner, but it has been caught out for being wrong about several news items. And it looks like it wasn’t a case of honest mistakes, but politically motivated spin.
These bots can be an awesome tool to achieve the same on a grand scale. Simply teach them to sniff out discussions about truths you want suppressed, and have the bots chime in with carefully crafted official narrative (thruthiness)
Nothing drags me back faster than a frickin' advert and a reminder about real money in the real world.
I don't like to be reminded too much about virtual assets in the virtual world either. Too much grind required to progress. Oh, grind can be fine if it's sort of optional, in longer games sometimes I do like to do something a bit mindless and get sidetracked, as long as I can get out of it when I want to. But take Battlefield 5. Fine shooter. But then they added all these "seasonal" objectives you have to complete in order to unlock new weapons (and more skins, yay). Kill 4 guys with a headshot in 1 round, do that much damage with RPGs, etc... and the game suddenly turned into a bloody chore, into work. Got seriously fed up with the game for a bit... until I figured the new weapons were kind of meh anyway, and just ignoring the "3 days left to complete campaign X" messages, and jumping in and play the game on my own terms. Which is still fun.
"The granting [of] patents inflames cupidity, excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits...The principle of the law from which such consequences flow cannot be just." The Economist, in 1851.
Some oil companies are already putting up charging points at petrol stations. Just another selling point to get more people to frequent their forecourt stores. And of course it makes sense for automakers to invest in 3rd party charging networks and help speed deployment, but buying bonds or shares is not the same as "paying for it" and getting directly involved in the actual operation of these charging networks, like Tesla is doing.
Tesla has around 450 charging locations (each w/ multiple charging points) across Europe. There are currently over 6000 CCS charging locations. Admittedly most of those are still the relatively slow 50kW variants, but now that we finally see EVs hitting the market for which superfast charging makes sense, it's expected that many of these locations will be upgraded to 175/350kW in the near future. Up till now, the Tesla car was the only game in town for long distance driving, and the market for fast chargers for other brands simply wasn't there, but with this Volvo as well as the new long range models from Hyundai, BMW, VW, Jaguar and others, that's going to change.
TFA correctly states who cares most about the current cryptocurrencies: speculators. That's probably 97% of the trading volume. Then there's 1% people dealing in dodgy crap, 1% people paying for semi-dodgy crap (like anonymous payments for a VPN), and 1% actual mainstream transactions. In other words: pretty much no normal person gives a crap about cryptocurrencies. What they do care about is sending money quickly, safely and cheaply to friends or shops. PayPal does that, and I expect that the WhatsApp coin will actually not be all that different from using PayPal. Except that FB will get to see all of your transactions.
How much is that $68k in today's dollars? How much did your first car set you back? And how much were you making? Also, EVs are expensive to buy but very cheap to run.
The Renault Zoe is around €26,000 ex VAT, with a range of 300+ km. The Hyundai Ioniq is around the same price with slightly less range. There are plenty of EV's for a lot less money, but with considerably less range.
Most car makers choose to NOT solve this issue like Tesla does: building a proprietary charging network. Instead they choose to rely on standard CCS charging stations that are already spreading all over Europe. So far there aren't many CCS fast charging stations (at 175 - 350 kW) comparable to Tesla's chargers in Europe, but the number is growing: over here there's already almost as many of them as there are Tesla chargers.
The future is clearly a fast charging network relying on 1 or 2 standards, supporting - and open to - all auto brands. The Tesla stations over here are already fitted with CCS leads but are not available to non-Tesla drivers. This is an issue that will solve itself; Tesla is considering opening up those stations to other brands, and in some countries they may be forced to by law when operating in public areas, especially on highways. BWM would never get the permits to build gas stations exclusively for BWM drivers, and while Tesla was considered to be a special case being a pioneer with proprietary charging tech, that privilege will end at some point.
Tesla clearly led the charge and built the new infrastructure needed for their cars from scratch, an admirable effort. But it is beyond silly at this stage to expect other auto makers to do the same.
The friend doesn't own the content, he merely has a subscription to stream it. And I bet the terms & conditions have something to say about when and where sharing that stream is allowed; generally that only includes members of one household, or a limited number of devices. That's not an unreasonable limitation.
I got a Doorbird instead. Is it more secure than the Ring? Doubtful. But it can run off the cloud if you want it to, with a little effort. The camera stream is available as RTSP, and the video intercom function supports SIP. My Doorbird is firewalled and talks to a home DVR system and Asterisk server. Same functionality, off the cloud, and will keep working if the company goes the way of the dodo.
Isn’t “nothing more than grandstanding” pretty much the definition of congressional hearings?
A great movie of all time should at least age well. Perhaps a movie should be at least, say, 10 years old before being even considered for that list. My guess is that in 10 years, Black Panther and Blackkklansman will be more or less forgotten.
It’s hard enough these days to find so called developers who can read a query plan, but I suppose you should be thankful they understand what an index is.
Badly written book, and I couldn't get through the 50 page monologue at the end.
The book has its issues (those monologues are certainly part of that), but I still enjoyed the story. And I was interested in some of the ideas behind it; when and where I was growing up it was extremely unlikely to come across such ideas - not just the full on libertarian ones but also her more mainstream notions - in books, on TV or in class. So while I never bought into Rand's philosophy, I daresay her books have influenced some of my views.
The book is supposed to be high literature to some (it isn’t, though I did enjoy reading it). But I’ll doubt you will find many people - even amongst the more staunch Rand fans - who enjoyed that trilogy train wreck. But perhaps you confused Atlas Shrugged with the Fountainhead, another Rand book turned into a (much better) movie.
Is that really the norm these days? I had one run-in with a US cop but that was ages ago: he pulled me over for running a 4 way stop (red blinking traffic light, I didn't even know what the hell that meant, and assumed it was the same as blinking yellow). It was the middle of the night on a quiet street, but the cop didn't seem overly concerned for his safety. No guns, no shouting, just a polite chat (and he let me off with a warning).
Pretty much what I'd expect of a normal cop. But then again I suppose the same could happen over here. Our cops generally do not pull out their guns unless there is an immediate and clear threat, but if the call comes down about armed suspects fleeing the scene and an ANPR matches the plate, you better believe that they will take similar precautions i.e. take cover and order the driver out of the car at gunpoint.
I wonder if this means even more will join ?
I hope that eventually more countries will adopt a similar law, as it appears they might.