But you'll also reduce the amount communication that way, which isn't necessarily a good thing. On my last job I got plenty of email but very little of it was actual spam. Most of it wasn't immediately actionable perhaps, and would have better been sent through another channel, but often was still useful for awareness.
The real problem is that most companies have a range of communication tools, but their employees generally have a very poor grasp of the best ways to use them. This idiotic voice memo idea only illustrates that point. This is a behavioural problem, not easily fixed by technology. At my job they did provide guidance of when and how to use each communication channel: face to face meetings, video calls, IMs, phone calls, emails, discussion forums, micro-blogging, web pages, and team or corporate Wikis. Plenty of people took those lessons to heart as they do not only help the recipients of your crap but also yourself. But even in a company with a culture of judicious use of communication channels did I get the occasional angry phone call about an email I had not replied to... sent 30 minutes earlier. Or the 50th iteration of a Reply-To-All email chain with little gems (replied-to-all, of course) like "Stop replying to all!!!1" or "Please take me off this email list"
Look at onshore wind turbines; they said the same thing about those a few years ago. But now they are pretty cheap and still getting cheaper, where in the past they needed subsidies to be viable. They got cheaper for a simple reason: thanks to the subsidies these things got built, and in the process we are learning how to build better ones. Compared to other sources of energy, there was and still is a vast upward potential in wind turbines to increase efficiency (in terms of kWhs generated per turbine), decrease production and installation costs, and greatly simplify maintenance which is another big cost driver. Newer turbines are higher, poking into a region where winds are more constant. The newest models do not even have to be stopped in heavy winds (current ones do, at some point the wind bends the turbine blades so far in they will strike the tower) which further increases overall production efficiency. The same applies to offshore wind farms. There's not many out there yet but already costs are falling rapidly due to innovations, like specially designed support ships and the use of inspection drones contributing to lower maintenance costs, a big factor in offshore wind.
Now is not the time to invest billions into large scale offshore wind farms. But an energy strategy aiming at replacing fossil fuels with renewables should, at this time, include subsidies for smaller offshore wind farms. See them as an investment into R&D to improve offshore wind farms and drive own costs, same as happened with onshore wind. This kind of R&D is not done in front of a blackboard or in a lab, it's practical engineering, making incremental improvements based on past experience.
Wait, the FAA is now saying airlines can't take passengers on their flights?!
Or is the FAA simply saying that what those "ride sharing" services do amounts to commercial air transport, requiring appropriately licensed pilots amongst other things? Airbus is simply proposing to develop and build, well, an air bus. Presumably these things will not be used by ride or fare share services, but used by taxi companies with the right licenses and pilots with a CPL. FAA isn't going to say no to that (though they might have something to say about what this does to the safe use of airspace)
Not just that. I only need a couple of minutes to go through 50 emails: most I can delete just by looking at the title, the rest I open, skim and delete or file as appropriate. Voice memos? I am going to have to open and listen to every one of them just to find out if they are spam or not, and if I get one from a legitimate source, I am going to have to listen to the whole damn thing to find out if there is something worthwhile in there.
Voice memos do not solve spam or email volume issues, instead it will massively excaberate those issues. And I bet we will have the added joy of having to listen to other people's voicemail again, like in the bad old days.
I don't mind the browser thing; I play BF4 exclusively in multiplayer mode, and I prefer a good browser based game server finder over a shitty one built into the game (especially the ones that are kind of designed for consoles). Otherwise I'm no fan of EA, BF4 is my only game in Origin.
At least in Norway,Sweden, Austria,Germany and the Netherlands. Here's a comprehensive report
By the way: I meant to use the term English term for favouring minorities when equally qualified: "positive action". In my own country this is literally translated as "positive discrimination", but in English this generally means favouring minorities even when not equally qualified.
Most European countries allow "positive discrimination", in the form of minority candidates being preferred over white males, if the candidates are otherwise equally qualified. In some countries this even stood up to a challenge in court.
The ring tone? I still hear it from time to time, and these days it mostly draws looks of pity.
About being different: what would you want out of a new player on the market? For me: stylish phones that are not super thin so they are easy to hold and have excellent battery life. Vanilla Android without bloatware. A 3.5mm jack (that's going to be a differentiator). And perhaps having a somewhat thicker phone will allow for better optics for the camera (that wart on the back of the new iPhones must have Jobs spinning in his grave).
It's not easy to send bribe money directly from the public coffers to the IOC officials. But if that money gets funnelled through, say, a construction company...
Seriously, I have no idea how or even if the IOC guys are bribed regularly. What I do know is that when assloads of public money is being spent on one-off projects, usually there is money changing hands under the table all along the chain.
People who need a higher specced board in a compact, low power configuration. Looks like this board is sold as a solution for applications like robotics, machine vision, and VR, which often requires a bit more processing power than a Raspberry Pi can offer. And it's $369 for the dev kit, the real question is what the price of the board alone will cost (especially in bulk).
Once it's clear that you gave out the wrong password (either because the phone shows only a cat's butthole, or because the digital forensics guys figure out what you did), you'll still go to jail if laws like this become a reality. Even if you have committed no other crime, and there is nothing dodgy on your phone.
We have had that happen in the Netherlands with another law: one that makes carrying an ID mandatory. Officials said it was no big deal; the police were only to ask for ID if they had a good reason to (for example when stopping you for a traffic offense), in other words "this law only works against criminals, not law abiding citizens", but it turned into a nice extra stick to beat people with. If the police stop you but can't make anything stick, they can still fine you if you don't carry ID. In the old days they had the power to bring you into the station to establish your identity if you had no ID on you, but only in cases where you actually broke the law.
Sometimes it just makes sense. Leasing instead of owning means you have a lot more flexibility, your capital isn't tied up, and if you lease something that turns out to be not to your liking, your headache will be an organisational rather than a financial one. My brother's small company actually owned their office but had to move to something larger, and then that office turned into a financial millstone around their necks (try selling any office space in this area post 2008, ha ha). Same happens with people who have to move for whatever reason (or worse: go through a divorce) and need to sell their house, but can't.
In the long run, owning is cheaper and you can do whatever you want to your property, but in a lot of cases that freedom isn't very important to people or companies. And when it comes to cars, I suspect that it will be a lot cheaper to rent an autonomous car instead of owning one in case that (second) car is not used daily. There is some convenience to owning a car; you can leave your crap in there and have it as dirty or clean as you want, it's always there to be used at a moment's notice. But if you're not using it every day anyway, who cares?
Re. point 1: Would routing stuff through a central server not make it harder to trace where the call is going? They can then listen in on the call traffic itself, but that's why you want point-to-point encryption. You can also opt to re-encrypt the streams between each client and the central server with another unique key pair, which (combined with padding) will make it harder to determine who is communicating with whom, the more total traffic there is.
I was responding to the (strange) claim that it would take 30.000 years to reach a nearby star even with an engine providing a constant 1g acceleration. Where we get that acceleration is left as an exercise to the reader.
At 1g? That will get you to c in about a year (disregarding relativistic effects), so under a decade to travel just over 4 lightyears sounds like the right ballpark.
Germany has plenty of problems with renewable energy, but they have an excellent national grid (much like the rest of Europe). A problem is that conventional plants cannot always ramp up or down quickly enough to cope with highly variable renewable power, and having a good national grid doesn't always solve that problem. You end up buying extra power at inflated prices, or are forced to dump power and sometimes even pay for the privilege. The grid manages but the economics fail. And that is where power storage comes in: it doesn't just balance the load but also prices.
The Internet was ours then, or at least it was the playground where we were top dog. Then clever nerds and businessmen ran with it and made billions, while ordinary people flocked to discover this new thing. That playground has grown to encompass the entire world, but our role in it hasn't grown with it, and we became largely irrelevant. The days of pioneering are over, it isn't ours anymore, and that's made some of us bitter. But I wouldn't call the old Internet better
My favorite explanation is "it's there, we just can't see it (yet)". Even if aliens are trying to contact us directly, what are the chances that we'd pick up their signal? Assuming that more advanced tech doesn't give them some magical toys to get in touch, just more powerful lasers or radio transmitters. And if they aren't trying, would we stand a chance of picking up their domestic transmissions, or even just telltale signs of life in their atmosphere? We've barely begun finding exoplanets, barely started figuring out some basic characteristics like temperature or presence of an atmosphere, and even when we can sort of reliably detect Earth-like life, there may be other forms of life that we're simply overlooking.
Besides, going public in itself is a pretty strenuous undertaking. If you're a small startup with limited resources (like financial experts), maybe you want to avoid this stuff.
Besides, rigor and discipline is something that a good VC can bring... perhaps in the form of a "nestor", a highly experienced consultant who knows what it takes to grow and run a company, what to do and what to avoid, often a (semi) retired CEO or entrepreneur. Not sure how common it is in the US for a VC to provide (or even impose) someone like that, but with the right guy it can be a great help.
Slashdot Mirror
We want to test the subjects, not torture them.
Depends on the subjects...
But you'll also reduce the amount communication that way, which isn't necessarily a good thing. On my last job I got plenty of email but very little of it was actual spam. Most of it wasn't immediately actionable perhaps, and would have better been sent through another channel, but often was still useful for awareness.
The real problem is that most companies have a range of communication tools, but their employees generally have a very poor grasp of the best ways to use them. This idiotic voice memo idea only illustrates that point. This is a behavioural problem, not easily fixed by technology. At my job they did provide guidance of when and how to use each communication channel: face to face meetings, video calls, IMs, phone calls, emails, discussion forums, micro-blogging, web pages, and team or corporate Wikis. Plenty of people took those lessons to heart as they do not only help the recipients of your crap but also yourself. But even in a company with a culture of judicious use of communication channels did I get the occasional angry phone call about an email I had not replied to... sent 30 minutes earlier. Or the 50th iteration of a Reply-To-All email chain with little gems (replied-to-all, of course) like "Stop replying to all!!!1" or "Please take me off this email list"
Look at onshore wind turbines; they said the same thing about those a few years ago. But now they are pretty cheap and still getting cheaper, where in the past they needed subsidies to be viable. They got cheaper for a simple reason: thanks to the subsidies these things got built, and in the process we are learning how to build better ones. Compared to other sources of energy, there was and still is a vast upward potential in wind turbines to increase efficiency (in terms of kWhs generated per turbine), decrease production and installation costs, and greatly simplify maintenance which is another big cost driver. Newer turbines are higher, poking into a region where winds are more constant. The newest models do not even have to be stopped in heavy winds (current ones do, at some point the wind bends the turbine blades so far in they will strike the tower) which further increases overall production efficiency. The same applies to offshore wind farms. There's not many out there yet but already costs are falling rapidly due to innovations, like specially designed support ships and the use of inspection drones contributing to lower maintenance costs, a big factor in offshore wind.
Now is not the time to invest billions into large scale offshore wind farms. But an energy strategy aiming at replacing fossil fuels with renewables should, at this time, include subsidies for smaller offshore wind farms. See them as an investment into R&D to improve offshore wind farms and drive own costs, same as happened with onshore wind. This kind of R&D is not done in front of a blackboard or in a lab, it's practical engineering, making incremental improvements based on past experience.
I wish I could see... that has got to be the poorest artist impression ever (of the Airbus craft, not of the autogyro)
Wait, the FAA is now saying airlines can't take passengers on their flights?!
Or is the FAA simply saying that what those "ride sharing" services do amounts to commercial air transport, requiring appropriately licensed pilots amongst other things? Airbus is simply proposing to develop and build, well, an air bus. Presumably these things will not be used by ride or fare share services, but used by taxi companies with the right licenses and pilots with a CPL. FAA isn't going to say no to that (though they might have something to say about what this does to the safe use of airspace)
Not just that. I only need a couple of minutes to go through 50 emails: most I can delete just by looking at the title, the rest I open, skim and delete or file as appropriate. Voice memos? I am going to have to open and listen to every one of them just to find out if they are spam or not, and if I get one from a legitimate source, I am going to have to listen to the whole damn thing to find out if there is something worthwhile in there.
Voice memos do not solve spam or email volume issues, instead it will massively excaberate those issues. And I bet we will have the added joy of having to listen to other people's voicemail again, like in the bad old days.
Same. I was really disappointed to learn FB bought them, but thankfully there's a couple of contenders on the horizon.
I don't mind the browser thing; I play BF4 exclusively in multiplayer mode, and I prefer a good browser based game server finder over a shitty one built into the game (especially the ones that are kind of designed for consoles). Otherwise I'm no fan of EA, BF4 is my only game in Origin.
At least in Norway,Sweden, Austria,Germany and the Netherlands. Here's a comprehensive report By the way: I meant to use the term English term for favouring minorities when equally qualified: "positive action". In my own country this is literally translated as "positive discrimination", but in English this generally means favouring minorities even when not equally qualified.
Most European countries allow "positive discrimination", in the form of minority candidates being preferred over white males, if the candidates are otherwise equally qualified. In some countries this even stood up to a challenge in court.
And, believe it or not, the Hindenberg had a smoking room. Now that's asking for trouble!
The ring tone? I still hear it from time to time, and these days it mostly draws looks of pity.
About being different: what would you want out of a new player on the market? For me: stylish phones that are not super thin so they are easy to hold and have excellent battery life. Vanilla Android without bloatware. A 3.5mm jack (that's going to be a differentiator). And perhaps having a somewhat thicker phone will allow for better optics for the camera (that wart on the back of the new iPhones must have Jobs spinning in his grave).
It's not easy to send bribe money directly from the public coffers to the IOC officials. But if that money gets funnelled through, say, a construction company...
Seriously, I have no idea how or even if the IOC guys are bribed regularly. What I do know is that when assloads of public money is being spent on one-off projects, usually there is money changing hands under the table all along the chain.
Who is going to buy this thing?
People who need a higher specced board in a compact, low power configuration. Looks like this board is sold as a solution for applications like robotics, machine vision, and VR, which often requires a bit more processing power than a Raspberry Pi can offer. And it's $369 for the dev kit, the real question is what the price of the board alone will cost (especially in bulk).
Once it's clear that you gave out the wrong password (either because the phone shows only a cat's butthole, or because the digital forensics guys figure out what you did), you'll still go to jail if laws like this become a reality. Even if you have committed no other crime, and there is nothing dodgy on your phone.
We have had that happen in the Netherlands with another law: one that makes carrying an ID mandatory. Officials said it was no big deal; the police were only to ask for ID if they had a good reason to (for example when stopping you for a traffic offense), in other words "this law only works against criminals, not law abiding citizens", but it turned into a nice extra stick to beat people with. If the police stop you but can't make anything stick, they can still fine you if you don't carry ID. In the old days they had the power to bring you into the station to establish your identity if you had no ID on you, but only in cases where you actually broke the law.
Sometimes it just makes sense. Leasing instead of owning means you have a lot more flexibility, your capital isn't tied up, and if you lease something that turns out to be not to your liking, your headache will be an organisational rather than a financial one. My brother's small company actually owned their office but had to move to something larger, and then that office turned into a financial millstone around their necks (try selling any office space in this area post 2008, ha ha). Same happens with people who have to move for whatever reason (or worse: go through a divorce) and need to sell their house, but can't.
In the long run, owning is cheaper and you can do whatever you want to your property, but in a lot of cases that freedom isn't very important to people or companies. And when it comes to cars, I suspect that it will be a lot cheaper to rent an autonomous car instead of owning one in case that (second) car is not used daily. There is some convenience to owning a car; you can leave your crap in there and have it as dirty or clean as you want, it's always there to be used at a moment's notice. But if you're not using it every day anyway, who cares?
Re. point 1: Would routing stuff through a central server not make it harder to trace where the call is going? They can then listen in on the call traffic itself, but that's why you want point-to-point encryption. You can also opt to re-encrypt the streams between each client and the central server with another unique key pair, which (combined with padding) will make it harder to determine who is communicating with whom, the more total traffic there is.
I was responding to the (strange) claim that it would take 30.000 years to reach a nearby star even with an engine providing a constant 1g acceleration. Where we get that acceleration is left as an exercise to the reader.
At 1g? That will get you to c in about a year (disregarding relativistic effects), so under a decade to travel just over 4 lightyears sounds like the right ballpark.
Germany has plenty of problems with renewable energy, but they have an excellent national grid (much like the rest of Europe). A problem is that conventional plants cannot always ramp up or down quickly enough to cope with highly variable renewable power, and having a good national grid doesn't always solve that problem. You end up buying extra power at inflated prices, or are forced to dump power and sometimes even pay for the privilege. The grid manages but the economics fail. And that is where power storage comes in: it doesn't just balance the load but also prices.
The Internet was ours then, or at least it was the playground where we were top dog. Then clever nerds and businessmen ran with it and made billions, while ordinary people flocked to discover this new thing. That playground has grown to encompass the entire world, but our role in it hasn't grown with it, and we became largely irrelevant. The days of pioneering are over, it isn't ours anymore, and that's made some of us bitter. But I wouldn't call the old Internet better
Token Ring is what Sauron gave to the lady of that upstart race of fairies nobody wanted to know about. I think he found it in a box of cereal.
My favorite explanation is "it's there, we just can't see it (yet)". Even if aliens are trying to contact us directly, what are the chances that we'd pick up their signal? Assuming that more advanced tech doesn't give them some magical toys to get in touch, just more powerful lasers or radio transmitters. And if they aren't trying, would we stand a chance of picking up their domestic transmissions, or even just telltale signs of life in their atmosphere? We've barely begun finding exoplanets, barely started figuring out some basic characteristics like temperature or presence of an atmosphere, and even when we can sort of reliably detect Earth-like life, there may be other forms of life that we're simply overlooking.
Besides, going public in itself is a pretty strenuous undertaking. If you're a small startup with limited resources (like financial experts), maybe you want to avoid this stuff.
Besides, rigor and discipline is something that a good VC can bring... perhaps in the form of a "nestor", a highly experienced consultant who knows what it takes to grow and run a company, what to do and what to avoid, often a (semi) retired CEO or entrepreneur. Not sure how common it is in the US for a VC to provide (or even impose) someone like that, but with the right guy it can be a great help.
You also only read such silly self-abasement in the west.