If the blueprints are already easy to create and readily available why doesn't everyone 3D print guns yet, this order protects that from happening.
And what, exactly, is being protected here?
There is really no justification for this court order, on several levels.
It's a violation of the 1st and 2nd amendments on its face. It's also unenforceable, and it ignores the abundant precedent of gun-making instructions and kits that have been on sale since forever. It also ignores the results of the previous attempts to ban information: the export laws against cryptography.
It also goes against existing federal law that says it's legal to make firearms for personal use.
Even if you think it's a new type of situation not covered by the 1st and 2nd amendments, it's a violation of the 10th amendment which says that rights not covered are held by the states and/or the people.
It's clear that as soon as people accept that the government can ban information in this one "very important" issue, they'll be ratcheting it up for the next "only slightly less" important issue, and the whole thing will lead to a labyrinthine set of rules and laws banning various selected topics using different metrics.
The only reason this is happening in the first place is because the anti-2nd amendment crowd see it as a new and unexplored way to try to curtail our rights.
This is really a stupid move, and the only result will be that someone has to burn money, time, and effort proving what is plainly obvious.
... none of the proposals call for breaking up the pseudo-monopolies. Instead, they aim to start a substantive debate by laying out different paths to address problems posed by the platforms.
Let's not propose a solution, let's not propose a method of making a *plan* for a solution, let's propose several plans for how to approach a solution, and have a debate!
Bureaucracy at its finest.
(Futurama quote: "Don't quote me the regulation! I chaired the committee that reviewed the proposal to change the color of the book that regulation is in." --Bureaucrat 1.0)
How do I know if the stock will go up or not? I have no idea. The stock is intrinsically worth about $0 at this point, but it is $291. Tesla has a market capitalization greater than GM. It makes no sense. My point is as an individual stockholder you guys are looking at the wrong thing. You are putting your money at a huge risk with very little additional upside and zero return in your investment until you sell. Do you think Tesla stock will double and go to $600? Then you "made" 100%. What if it goes bankrupt? You lost all your money. Is the risk worth potentially making 100%? That is nuts.
Ask me in about a year - that's my horizon for holding the Tesla stock.
Well then as a stockholder you are looking at the wrong thing then. You can have all those things and still go out of business. The fact is that Tesla is $10 billion in debt and has a negative 90 P/E ratio. In addition, Tesla will need to go back to the capital markets to get more money.
Just a hypothetical question.
Suppose, just suppose, Tesla turns a profit in Q3 and Q4 of this year.
What would that do to the neg 90 P/E ratio, and would they still need to get more money?
Put aside whether they will or wont, first answer the question: If they become suddenly profitable, what will the outlook be like?
I suppose we can expect more muskisdelusionalandoutofcash postings.
In the last Tesla thread I pointed out that, as an stockholder, what I am looking for is NOT Elon Musk's cute personality or science fantasy. Nor do I care to whig out at every little story of production problems. What I am looking for is:
Technological leadership.
Market presence.
Production leadership.
Most of all: backorders and strong forecast. None of the rest matters unless you have someone willing to buy it. Tesla has that in spades.
So Tesla is delivering. Skepticism is healthy but not to the extent that the Tesla naysayers on/. take it.
There are a lot of people sending out fake news about Tesla nowadays, but there's an interesting bit of information.
Normally, in the two weeks ahead of a financial report the stock will mirror the report outcome. If the report is good, the stock will rise a little just before the announcement. If the report is bad, the stock will drop a little.
Tesla will be making their Q2 announcement on Wednesday (after the market closes), and it's dropped by 10% in that time.
In any other stock that would indicate bad news, but for Tesla? It could indicate a last-ditch effort for the bears to drive the stock down before a "good news" report. People are changing Tesla from "hold" to "sell", and saying that they're certain Tesla will need another round of financing.
(Musk claims that they will not need another round, and that Tesla will be profitable in Q3 and Q4 of this year.)
Tesla short interest is 34m shares right now, and with 170m shares outstanding, that's about 20% of Tesla is being shorted right now. 25% is held by Musk, so that's about 1/4 of public shares are held short.
There are three key periods coming up for Tesla: the Q2 report (Wednesday), and Q3 and Q4 of this year.
Over 50% of Tesla shares are held by 5 entities: Musk, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, and so on. If the institutions dig their heels into the sand and refuse to sell, and if the other public shareholders also refuse to sell, there will be a short run and the stock price will skyrocket. There's nowhere that the short sellers can go to settle.
If no one is selling the stock, or there are many buyers, including panic buyers, caused by other short sellers attempting to close out their positions as they lose more and more money, you may be in a position to incur serious losses.
The institutions know this. Many of the public shareholders know this.
If the stock jumps up and Tesla seems reasonably solvent, it's estimated the short sellers will be out several tens of billions of dollars.
Expect a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth...
(I own shares in Tesla and want to see them succeed.)
1) Change the name to something more recognizeable. Some modification of the "Chrome" seems to be popular right now, so try things like "Chromantum", "Chromicisity", or "Chromabat". The closer to "Chrome", the better.
2) The color scheme using steel grey and ice-cold blue still has a tiny bit warmth to it. This should be removed, using a browser should feel like entering a walk-in freezer.
3) The preferences pages still have a few lines and borders that give the options an organized feeling. Mozilla should transition to a completely non-delimited look, so that everything looks like it's just placed on a white page.
4) Also on the preferences, get rid of the group headers. Since all the options are labeled, the headers are useless anyway.
5) There is still too much contrast between screen elements. For example, the slider on the right hand side of the screen can still be distinguished from its rail - the slider should be made lighter and/or the rail should be darker, to reduce annoying contrast.
6) More animations, such as the "cylon stare" when loading a tab, or the "burst of shadow" that happens when you open a new tab. These don't take any time to implement, don't need debugging or maintenance, and add greatly to the browsing experience.
7) Be sure to change the programming interface with each new update. Users only use any one extension about 30% of all sessions (on average), so this matches well with what users want.
8) Never, ever incorporate popular extensions into the core product for efficiency. Blocking ads and better security should be the end users task to learn about, decide, and implement. If you *must* implement something like the "do not track" button, be sure to be extremely careful not to piss off advertizers: implement it by default "off", so that users can choose.
9) Don't bother implementing an easy way to use encryption in the E-mail reader - no one wants that.
10) When all else fails, copy the competition (Chrome). There's no such thing as "product distinction" in the browser marketplace, one browser is the same as another. Don't bother trying anything that could make you better than Google.
11) And finally, always cater to the average user. Never implement anything that would appeal to advanced users, never try anything new and innovative, and never "play to the choir". Keep it simple, and keep your average users happy.
You probably need to merge Mars and Io or some other sizable planet/moon to get the right conditions. Maybe move Venus to the Mars orbit and create a bi-planetary system like Terra/Luna.
After some quick googling:
Mars is about 1/10 the mass of Earth.
Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta total about 1% of Mars' mass. Crashing them into the planet wouldn't be enough.
Deimos and Phobos and Halley's comet are each a couple/several orders of magnitude smaller, you would need hundreds or thousands of these to get the same effect as Ceres.
The total mass of Saturn's rings is about 1% of the mass needed.
The mass of Ganymeade, Callisto, Europa, and Io (moons of Jupiter) are about 30% the mass needed.
It looks like there is no reasonable way to increase the mass of Mars sufficiently to get a reasonable atmosphere. You would also need the increase to be iron-rich, to make the needed magnetic field.
What walls can we build next? Oh, right: 200-foot walls along all our borders to keep the monsters and zombies at bay....
Which was a campaign promise, which a lot of people want, which would help us economically, and which should be at the very least debated without rancor.
Show us how unrestricted immigration will benefit us and we'll listen.
Someone gets uppity, freeze their ability to spend money. Want to know what someone is buying, where they are going, what their habits are? If they do it all with credit card, you can! Forget wall street, the prime beneficiaries are fascist governments.
Governments hate cash because they make it easy to do business they don't like without them knowing about it. The government you've got today may not be the government you've got tomorrow, so you shouldn't hand them that information.
Use cash whenever possible.
And this has actually happened.
Soon after Wikileaks released the gulf war information, including the "collateral murder" video, the credit companies froze their accounts, effectively cutting them off from donations and keeping $11 million in donations already in account.
Say what you will about Wikileaks, its activities are legal and it serves a valuable purpose in keeping certain governments in line.
At the time people kept saying "this isn't censorship, credit card companies are private companies and can choose who they do business with".
I honestly think one of the main reasons Trump won was the media's refusal to call him out on obvious lies and his shady business record. And that refusal was fueled by a desire to see a horse race and to suck up all those ad buys. Trump should never have been a serious candidate. He refused to release his tax returns, has a string of failed businesses and a court case where he admitted under oath his net worth isn't near what he claims and a long history of extra-marital affairs of the sort that don't go down well with the base he was trying to appeal to. That baggage should have wrecked him. But the media continually went easy on him even as they piled on Hillary. Of course if they'd buried Trump in his own bad press early on folks would have stopped paying attention and the guys bank rolling his campaign would stop; meaning no more free eyeballs and no more free ad money. Trump got something like a billion in free coverage most of it positive. But then again if the media was doing it's job we'd be calling Bernie Mr President.
Okay, just so I'm clear here.
You think the media *wasn't* incessantly harsh on Trump in the run-up to the election.
You think most of the media coverage was positive.
I am at a loss as to how, exactly, the media could have been more harsh...
OpenStreetMap is pretty damn good. For example, the OsmAnd android app allows you to browse in excellent detail any offline downloaded map. In this sense it's far superior to Google maps. It can even calculate offline directions.
The problem is OpenStreetMap is not easy for editing or browsing on a computer. Try finding a GUI. There are two dozen and they all suck. OpenStreetMap needs a professional editor/viewer for all platforms and it could be vastly more popular.
One problem with Google maps is the (lack of) contrast.
On Google, choose any town or city and Zoom down looking for streets. The streets are juuuuust sligtly darker than the background, and there's no variation in the background. It gives the impression of a map of highways with lots and lots of empty space in between.
This was driven home to me recently when I wanted to find out where a road went in my area... and couldn't. It's impossible to trace the road with your eyes at a reasonable zoom level, and at the level where the road has labels you're too close to get an idea of the road relative to anything else.
Choose any town or city and Zoom down looking for streets. Roads in OSM are perfectly readable at reasonable resolutions, and you can even see the difference between different types of areas.
I don't know how "this makes money" on Google, but maybe somehow it does.
Can any of you smart mathematicians and physicists possibly down-translate this for the rest of us?
I'm sure I'm not alone in admitting I have not the slightest idea what the hell this is. OK, maybe I'm alone in admitting it, but I'm sure I'm not alone in having no idea what this is saying.
Around 1940 (IIRC), Eugene Wigner pointed out that symmetries in physics let is map physical theories to abstract groups, and this can place restrictions on what the correct equations have to be, in a way that lets us winnow down the possible theories to only those that satisfy the group topologies.
Suppose you have a square playing card nestled in a square indentation on a table (a regular playing card, except it's square instead of rectangular). How many ways are there to pick up the card and place it back down in the indentation?
The answer is 8 possible ways. If you paint one of the edges of the card, then there are 4 possible sides (of the hole) where the painted edge can go, and then you can have the card face-up or face-down. Each of these placements corresponds to a rotation or a flip of the card: Four rotations (including the identity rotation of 0 degrees), and four flips, along the vertical, horizontal, or two diagonal axes.
No matter how many rotations and flips you make, you always end up in one of the 8 basic positions. Thus, the operations form a group - called the "dihedral" group. The operations are closed: no matter how many flips and rotates you use, it ends up as the same as one of the original 8. Each operation has an inverse, and the 0 degree rotation acts as an identity element. (It's also associative, but that's difficult to show.)
Now imagine the card centered on the X-Y plane, and draw 4 vectors from the origin out to each of the four corners. You can define 8 matrices that flip the vectors in various ways, each matrix being associated with one of the flip or rotate operations.
Thus, the 8 matrices become a representation of the dihedral group. This puts some strong restrictions on the types of matrix you use: each matrix has to have length 1 (it can't change the length of the vectors), and you can't flip one edge over without flipping the opposite edge, because you can't "twist" the card. The matrix length can't be -1 because that would make the card a mirror image - the "J" of a Jack would curve to the right instead of the left.
You can now use matrix mathematics to prove things about your group.
For a different group, consider a vector going from the origin to the unit sphere. You can consider all matrices that rotate the vector in 3D without changing its length or moving its origin. This also forms a group (operations are closed, operations have inverses, and there's an identity operation), but it's an infinite group (a Lie group) and the sphere surface is "smooth". This means that you now can now use differential geometry to prove things about your group.
This group is called SU(3), the "Special Unitary group". It's "Unitary" because the rotations don't change the lengths of the vectors (the matrices are of length 1), and it's "Special" because it doesn't allow mirror-images: the determinant ("length") of the matrix cannot be -1, in the same way that we can't have a matrix of length -1 when rotating cards.
Now consider a physics experiment. We set up an apparatus, calculate the wave equation, and at the end we measure (for example) the energy. We measure energy by applying an operator to the wave equation that describes the experiment.
We can imagine rotating our point of view around the experiment, so that when we do the experiment we measure the energy looking from the other side of the apparatus.
We expect in that case to get the same value.
This means that the energy operator we apply to the wave eq
Also, define "need." We could go back to the client (dumb terminal)/server centralized model of computing, but even the "dumb terminals" are computers in this day and age.
And not everyone wants to hand their private data over to a megalith like Microsoft, Google, or Amazon, so there's a place for computing devices that don't HAVE to act as terminals.
I mean, you could always take Uber, be recorded, tracked, and advertised to. But sometimes, you just need to drive that red Barchetta on a winding mountain road.
Also, the summary implies the article is stupid.
If, and I mean if, this is the sort of question to ask, it would ask how much computing does the world need. Computers run the gamut of speed from slow to fast, and capabilities from microcontroller to high-end server.
Not to mention the capabilities of a display adapter used for rendering or as a general-purpose parallel computing device.
From the viewpoint of information theory, all computers are equivalent in the sense that they can be shown equivalent to a universal turing machine, so the question isn't even definable in the mathematical sense, but we could assign an arbitrary measure and time scale to make it meaningful to humans.
For example, "millions of 8-bit additions per second" sounds like a reasonable low-level measurement (compare to "mm", for instance).
Then one could ask "how much computing does the world need".
And now we need to define "need". Just about every electronic device you can purchase today has an embedded microcontroller with a fixed program. Clocks and watches have little computers inside them.
All cars need computers to manage their inner workings, and most of the world doesn't own a car but would like to. The average car has about 30 computers.
Has that been included in the calculations?
Computer time used to be metered. To take a course in college you were allocated a (generous for the application) number of CPU minutes to do your homework (both computer and non-computer classes). To do a study you were allocated a number of CPU minutes to use for the calculations.
Today, compute time is so cheap we don't to meter it - we meter the amount of electricity that is used, or the annoyance of keeping the hardware running.
How much computing would people use if they had access to an unlimited supply?
We don't really know, because we're still on the leading edge of the bell curve. We yet to saturate even one person's use of computing - we still don't have ubiquitous AI in self-driving cars and factories.
Article is stupid. It's impossible to answer the question today, and they're even asking the wrong questions.
I'm sure they already know this, but the algorithm isn't designed to trip up GOP politicians. It says a lot more about how they choose to phrase their message and talk about issues, than any agenda seeking to silence them on Twitter.
When what you post is designed to be inflammatory and lower discourse and a system designed to combat that properly flags it, maybe its working as intended and you should look inwards? No matter where you stand, there are good and bad ways to engage in discourse. On all topics, with all points of view.
Facebook blocked the political ads of Florida state representative Matt Caldwell, whose ad depicts Caldwell shooting a shotgun and talking about his support of the Second Amendment.
Everything about this ad was legal, appropriate, and not offensive in a violent, lurid, or sexual way. There was no innuendo or intent to deceive.
It's not "how they choose to phrase their message", it's the content, plain and simple.
Gun ownership has enough support in this nation to be a political issue that can be discussed, debated, and decided by the people.
If you are against gun ownership that's fine, but the political issue is legal and we should be talking about it.
Facebook is undermining the political process, the same way that the Russians did in *your* election.
Why does Facebook have to choose political sides at all?
Why can't their rules for allowed opinion be non political?
If you think for one second that Trump would go to war with China over Taiwan, you're delusional. First, he doesn't even know the difference between the two. Second, he'll follow the money, which is China.
Xi Jinping has made his ambitions very clear. And we will do nothing to stop it.
People will make shit up, and no one will call them on it.
Trump is most definitely the "pushback" president: he pushed back against North Korea, he's currently pushing back against Iran, he's pushing back against unfair trade practices from allies and adversaries, and he pushed back against terrorism by defeating ISIS.
He has no problem taking direct action to stop something, so I have to ask:
So I just read that Tesla asked for refunds from dealers in order to cover their debts. I suppose this is a lie as well?
That's not a lie, but it's a skewed interpretation of what actually happened.
Without posting my own explanation (which also might be skewed), do some digging into what actually happened, find a copy of the letter actually sent, and decide for yourself whether it's of any importance.
Someone else made a valid point about disclosing biases, so here is mine: I own Tesla stock, and I'm "long" on it.
I originally wanted to do some study of the stock market, and I purchased the stock to make the study "valuable" to me.
That turned out to be a lucky choice because Tesla is the hurricane eye of controversial stock market reporting. It's the perfect test case for deciding whether stock market news reports, statistics, and opinions have any informational value.
In any event, be aware that I own some shares and have an interest in seeing Tesla succeed.
Tesla has been hit with a torrent of fake news recently, trying to drive the stock down.
Most obviously and recently was the following:
1) Someone (not Tesla) posted that 23% of Tesla reservations have been cancelled. 2) Based on #1, an analyst downgraded the stock from "hold" to "underperform". 3) Tesla stock plummeted 4) Tesla notices #1 above and responded:
Dunno where this bs is coming from. Who knows about the future, but last week we had over 2000 S/X and 5000 Model 3 *new* net orders. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2018
(Note: Tesla makes about 6,000 cars/month, so an increase of 7000 cars puts them even further behind on reservations. And as noted in the link below, they have not started showing them in stores yet, so Tesla has yet to tap the "drive before they buy" potential pool of customers.)
Word on the street is that shorts are running scared, doing everything they can to drive down the stock price. Including insider sabotage, misleading financial spin, and online harassment such as the OP.
This is basically the last-ditch effort of Tesla bears to drive the stock down. Once the next two quarters financials are in, there will be no case for shorting Tesla stock whatsoever.
I don't think there's a conspiracy, but I *do* believe that, a few years ago, everyone sort of tacitly agreed that it would be good to have Russia as an enemy.
First (a couple of years ago) we heard about unspecified attacks on "critical infrastructure" by "Russian state-sponsored actors".
The thing is, the timing of the Steele dossier is inconsistent with the Russian narrative. If Hillary had known about the dossier during the campaign, she would have moved heaven and Earth to get it in the public eye before the election. The fact that she *didn't* implies that she was certain of winning the election, and the dossier was prepared for a different purpose.
There's no really good evidence that the Russian government is involved with any of the hacking, except to say "That's something they would do". It's the fallacy of the reversed conditional,
I think what we're seeing is a long-term narrative to (eventually) justify a conflict with Russia.
...and Trump stuck a pin in that by meeting with Putin and starting a normal political relationship.
(Probably every response to this post will call me out as a Russian puppet, use foul insults, or predict Trump going to federal prison. Ignore those posts - the ones to read are ones that have a reasoned argument, citing facts, hopefully with links backing up facts, and painting a believable picture of an alternate explanation.)
Looking at the image from the OP, I have the following notes:
1) There is still a tiny bit of warmth in the color scheme. They should work to remove this last bit of friendliness to make the browser maximally cold and uninviting.
2) There is still too much contrast between the white background and window elements. For example, using Chrome I can still see where the slider is in its rail on the right-hand side of a website. The white background should be made softer (lower luminance), and the window elements should be a bit brighter (higher luminance) to bring them closer together.
3) There are only 12 incomprehensible icons on the address bar line, to the right of the address bar. The screen needs more googaws, curios, gimcracks, and oddities to function properly. Addresses and/or search fields are of less importance so make the address field narrower so that the search terms are never fully shown, in favor of more gizmos and thingamajigs.
4) The red, orange, and green dots on the upper left are a nice touch. In reference to "Demolition Man", maybe change these to three seashells?
Slashdot Mirror
The Republicans are very happy with the situation now. Easy for Vlad to help out keeping them in power. Why risk upsetting the gravy train?
I thought that no voting machines were hacked, and no vote tallys were changed. Is that no longer true?
I'm having trouble keeping up with the narrative here.
Can you help me out? Do you have a link to a recent article or something?
If the blueprints are already easy to create and readily available why doesn't everyone 3D print guns yet, this order protects that from happening.
And what, exactly, is being protected here?
There is really no justification for this court order, on several levels.
It's a violation of the 1st and 2nd amendments on its face. It's also unenforceable, and it ignores the abundant precedent of gun-making instructions and kits that have been on sale since forever. It also ignores the results of the previous attempts to ban information: the export laws against cryptography.
It also goes against existing federal law that says it's legal to make firearms for personal use.
Even if you think it's a new type of situation not covered by the 1st and 2nd amendments, it's a violation of the 10th amendment which says that rights not covered are held by the states and/or the people.
It's clear that as soon as people accept that the government can ban information in this one "very important" issue, they'll be ratcheting it up for the next "only slightly less" important issue, and the whole thing will lead to a labyrinthine set of rules and laws banning various selected topics using different metrics.
The only reason this is happening in the first place is because the anti-2nd amendment crowd see it as a new and unexplored way to try to curtail our rights.
This is really a stupid move, and the only result will be that someone has to burn money, time, and effort proving what is plainly obvious.
... none of the proposals call for breaking up the pseudo-monopolies. Instead, they aim to start a substantive debate by laying out different paths to address problems posed by the platforms.
Let's not propose a solution, let's not propose a method of making a *plan* for a solution, let's propose several plans for how to approach a solution, and have a debate!
Bureaucracy at its finest.
(Futurama quote: "Don't quote me the regulation! I chaired the committee that reviewed the proposal to change the color of the book that regulation is in." --Bureaucrat 1.0)
How do I know if the stock will go up or not? I have no idea. The stock is intrinsically worth about $0 at this point, but it is $291. Tesla has a market capitalization greater than GM. It makes no sense. My point is as an individual stockholder you guys are looking at the wrong thing. You are putting your money at a huge risk with very little additional upside and zero return in your investment until you sell. Do you think Tesla stock will double and go to $600? Then you "made" 100%. What if it goes bankrupt? You lost all your money. Is the risk worth potentially making 100%? That is nuts.
Ask me in about a year - that's my horizon for holding the Tesla stock.
Well then as a stockholder you are looking at the wrong thing then. You can have all those things and still go out of business. The fact is that Tesla is $10 billion in debt and has a negative 90 P/E ratio. In addition, Tesla will need to go back to the capital markets to get more money.
Just a hypothetical question.
Suppose, just suppose, Tesla turns a profit in Q3 and Q4 of this year.
What would that do to the neg 90 P/E ratio, and would they still need to get more money?
Put aside whether they will or wont, first answer the question: If they become suddenly profitable, what will the outlook be like?
Tesla tends to run in the red in the years running up to a new model, then makes a profit for the next year or so.
If Musk is correct, and they start being profitable in Q3 and Q4, what will happen to the stock?
I suppose we can expect more muskisdelusionalandoutofcash postings.
In the last Tesla thread I pointed out that, as an stockholder, what I am looking for is NOT Elon Musk's cute personality or science fantasy. Nor do I care to whig out at every little story of production problems. What I am looking for is:
Technological leadership.
Market presence.
Production leadership.
Most of all: backorders and strong forecast. None of the rest matters unless you have someone willing to buy it. Tesla has that in spades.
So Tesla is delivering. Skepticism is healthy but not to the extent that the Tesla naysayers on /. take it.
There are a lot of people sending out fake news about Tesla nowadays, but there's an interesting bit of information.
Normally, in the two weeks ahead of a financial report the stock will mirror the report outcome. If the report is good, the stock will rise a little just before the announcement. If the report is bad, the stock will drop a little.
Tesla will be making their Q2 announcement on Wednesday (after the market closes), and it's dropped by 10% in that time.
In any other stock that would indicate bad news, but for Tesla? It could indicate a last-ditch effort for the bears to drive the stock down before a "good news" report. People are changing Tesla from "hold" to "sell", and saying that they're certain Tesla will need another round of financing.
(Musk claims that they will not need another round, and that Tesla will be profitable in Q3 and Q4 of this year.)
Tesla short interest is 34m shares right now, and with 170m shares outstanding, that's about 20% of Tesla is being shorted right now. 25% is held by Musk, so that's about 1/4 of public shares are held short.
There are three key periods coming up for Tesla: the Q2 report (Wednesday), and Q3 and Q4 of this year.
Over 50% of Tesla shares are held by 5 entities: Musk, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, and so on. If the institutions dig their heels into the sand and refuse to sell, and if the other public shareholders also refuse to sell, there will be a short run and the stock price will skyrocket. There's nowhere that the short sellers can go to settle.
If no one is selling the stock, or there are many buyers, including panic buyers, caused by other short sellers attempting to close out their positions as they lose more and more money, you may be in a position to incur serious losses.
The institutions know this. Many of the public shareholders know this.
If the stock jumps up and Tesla seems reasonably solvent, it's estimated the short sellers will be out several tens of billions of dollars.
Expect a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth...
(I own shares in Tesla and want to see them succeed.)
1) Change the name to something more recognizeable. Some modification of the "Chrome" seems to be popular right now, so try things like "Chromantum", "Chromicisity", or "Chromabat". The closer to "Chrome", the better.
2) The color scheme using steel grey and ice-cold blue still has a tiny bit warmth to it. This should be removed, using a browser should feel like entering a walk-in freezer.
3) The preferences pages still have a few lines and borders that give the options an organized feeling. Mozilla should transition to a completely non-delimited look, so that everything looks like it's just placed on a white page.
4) Also on the preferences, get rid of the group headers. Since all the options are labeled, the headers are useless anyway.
5) There is still too much contrast between screen elements. For example, the slider on the right hand side of the screen can still be distinguished from its rail - the slider should be made lighter and/or the rail should be darker, to reduce annoying contrast.
6) More animations, such as the "cylon stare" when loading a tab, or the "burst of shadow" that happens when you open a new tab. These don't take any time to implement, don't need debugging or maintenance, and add greatly to the browsing experience.
7) Be sure to change the programming interface with each new update. Users only use any one extension about 30% of all sessions (on average), so this matches well with what users want.
8) Never, ever incorporate popular extensions into the core product for efficiency. Blocking ads and better security should be the end users task to learn about, decide, and implement. If you *must* implement something like the "do not track" button, be sure to be extremely careful not to piss off advertizers: implement it by default "off", so that users can choose.
9) Don't bother implementing an easy way to use encryption in the E-mail reader - no one wants that.
10) When all else fails, copy the competition (Chrome). There's no such thing as "product distinction" in the browser marketplace, one browser is the same as another. Don't bother trying anything that could make you better than Google.
11) And finally, always cater to the average user. Never implement anything that would appeal to advanced users, never try anything new and innovative, and never "play to the choir". Keep it simple, and keep your average users happy.
You probably need to merge Mars and Io or some other sizable planet/moon to get the right conditions. Maybe move Venus to the Mars orbit and create a bi-planetary system like Terra/Luna.
After some quick googling:
Mars is about 1/10 the mass of Earth.
Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta total about 1% of Mars' mass. Crashing them into the planet wouldn't be enough.
Deimos and Phobos and Halley's comet are each a couple/several orders of magnitude smaller, you would need hundreds or thousands of these to get the same effect as Ceres.
The total mass of Saturn's rings is about 1% of the mass needed.
The mass of Ganymeade, Callisto, Europa, and Io (moons of Jupiter) are about 30% the mass needed.
It looks like there is no reasonable way to increase the mass of Mars sufficiently to get a reasonable atmosphere. You would also need the increase to be iron-rich, to make the needed magnetic field.
What walls can we build next? Oh, right: 200-foot walls along all our borders to keep the monsters and zombies at bay....
Which was a campaign promise, which a lot of people want, which would help us economically, and which should be at the very least debated without rancor.
Show us how unrestricted immigration will benefit us and we'll listen.
Debate by insult is not debate.
Someone gets uppity, freeze their ability to spend money. Want to know what someone is buying, where they are going, what their habits are? If they do it all with credit card, you can! Forget wall street, the prime beneficiaries are fascist governments.
Governments hate cash because they make it easy to do business they don't like without them knowing about it. The government you've got today may not be the government you've got tomorrow, so you shouldn't hand them that information.
Use cash whenever possible.
And this has actually happened.
Soon after Wikileaks released the gulf war information, including the "collateral murder" video, the credit companies froze their accounts, effectively cutting them off from donations and keeping $11 million in donations already in account.
Say what you will about Wikileaks, its activities are legal and it serves a valuable purpose in keeping certain governments in line.
At the time people kept saying "this isn't censorship, credit card companies are private companies and can choose who they do business with".
I honestly think one of the main reasons Trump won was the media's refusal to call him out on obvious lies and his shady business record. And that refusal was fueled by a desire to see a horse race and to suck up all those ad buys. Trump should never have been a serious candidate. He refused to release his tax returns, has a string of failed businesses and a court case where he admitted under oath his net worth isn't near what he claims and a long history of extra-marital affairs of the sort that don't go down well with the base he was trying to appeal to. That baggage should have wrecked him. But the media continually went easy on him even as they piled on Hillary.
Of course if they'd buried Trump in his own bad press early on folks would have stopped paying attention and the guys bank rolling his campaign would stop; meaning no more free eyeballs and no more free ad money. Trump got something like a billion in free coverage most of it positive. But then again if the media was doing it's job we'd be calling Bernie Mr President.
Okay, just so I'm clear here.
You think the media *wasn't* incessantly harsh on Trump in the run-up to the election.
You think most of the media coverage was positive.
I am at a loss as to how, exactly, the media could have been more harsh...
OpenStreetMap is pretty damn good. For example, the OsmAnd android app allows you to browse in excellent detail any offline downloaded map. In this sense it's far superior to Google maps. It can even calculate offline directions.
The problem is OpenStreetMap is not easy for editing or browsing on a computer. Try finding a GUI. There are two dozen and they all suck. OpenStreetMap needs a professional editor/viewer for all platforms and it could be vastly more popular.
One problem with Google maps is the (lack of) contrast.
On Google, choose any town or city and Zoom down looking for streets. The streets are juuuuust sligtly darker than the background, and there's no variation in the background. It gives the impression of a map of highways with lots and lots of empty space in between.
This was driven home to me recently when I wanted to find out where a road went in my area... and couldn't. It's impossible to trace the road with your eyes at a reasonable zoom level, and at the level where the road has labels you're too close to get an idea of the road relative to anything else.
Choose any town or city and Zoom down looking for streets. Roads in OSM are perfectly readable at reasonable resolutions, and you can even see the difference between different types of areas.
I don't know how "this makes money" on Google, but maybe somehow it does.
Can any of you smart mathematicians and physicists possibly down-translate this for the rest of us?
I'm sure I'm not alone in admitting I have not the slightest idea what the hell this is. OK, maybe I'm alone in admitting it, but I'm sure I'm not alone in having no idea what this is saying.
Around 1940 (IIRC), Eugene Wigner pointed out that symmetries in physics let is map physical theories to abstract groups, and this can place restrictions on what the correct equations have to be, in a way that lets us winnow down the possible theories to only those that satisfy the group topologies.
Suppose you have a square playing card nestled in a square indentation on a table (a regular playing card, except it's square instead of rectangular). How many ways are there to pick up the card and place it back down in the indentation?
The answer is 8 possible ways. If you paint one of the edges of the card, then there are 4 possible sides (of the hole) where the painted edge can go, and then you can have the card face-up or face-down. Each of these placements corresponds to a rotation or a flip of the card: Four rotations (including the identity rotation of 0 degrees), and four flips, along the vertical, horizontal, or two diagonal axes.
No matter how many rotations and flips you make, you always end up in one of the 8 basic positions. Thus, the operations form a group - called the "dihedral" group. The operations are closed: no matter how many flips and rotates you use, it ends up as the same as one of the original 8. Each operation has an inverse, and the 0 degree rotation acts as an identity element. (It's also associative, but that's difficult to show.)
Now imagine the card centered on the X-Y plane, and draw 4 vectors from the origin out to each of the four corners. You can define 8 matrices that flip the vectors in various ways, each matrix being associated with one of the flip or rotate operations.
Thus, the 8 matrices become a representation of the dihedral group. This puts some strong restrictions on the types of matrix you use: each matrix has to have length 1 (it can't change the length of the vectors), and you can't flip one edge over without flipping the opposite edge, because you can't "twist" the card. The matrix length can't be -1 because that would make the card a mirror image - the "J" of a Jack would curve to the right instead of the left.
You can now use matrix mathematics to prove things about your group.
For a different group, consider a vector going from the origin to the unit sphere. You can consider all matrices that rotate the vector in 3D without changing its length or moving its origin. This also forms a group (operations are closed, operations have inverses, and there's an identity operation), but it's an infinite group (a Lie group) and the sphere surface is "smooth". This means that you now can now use differential geometry to prove things about your group.
This group is called SU(3), the "Special Unitary group". It's "Unitary" because the rotations don't change the lengths of the vectors (the matrices are of length 1), and it's "Special" because it doesn't allow mirror-images: the determinant ("length") of the matrix cannot be -1, in the same way that we can't have a matrix of length -1 when rotating cards.
Now consider a physics experiment. We set up an apparatus, calculate the wave equation, and at the end we measure (for example) the energy. We measure energy by applying an operator to the wave equation that describes the experiment.
We can imagine rotating our point of view around the experiment, so that when we do the experiment we measure the energy looking from the other side of the apparatus.
We expect in that case to get the same value.
This means that the energy operator we apply to the wave eq
Try M51 - it's a whirlpool galaxy that can be easily seen from Earth with a small telescope.
Article is paywalled.
Also, define "need." We could go back to the client (dumb terminal)/server centralized model of computing, but even the "dumb terminals" are computers in this day and age.
And not everyone wants to hand their private data over to a megalith like Microsoft, Google, or Amazon, so there's a place for computing devices that don't HAVE to act as terminals.
I mean, you could always take Uber, be recorded, tracked, and advertised to. But sometimes, you just need to drive that red Barchetta on a winding mountain road.
Also, the summary implies the article is stupid.
If, and I mean if, this is the sort of question to ask, it would ask how much computing does the world need. Computers run the gamut of speed from slow to fast, and capabilities from microcontroller to high-end server.
Not to mention the capabilities of a display adapter used for rendering or as a general-purpose parallel computing device.
From the viewpoint of information theory, all computers are equivalent in the sense that they can be shown equivalent to a universal turing machine, so the question isn't even definable in the mathematical sense, but we could assign an arbitrary measure and time scale to make it meaningful to humans.
For example, "millions of 8-bit additions per second" sounds like a reasonable low-level measurement (compare to "mm", for instance).
Then one could ask "how much computing does the world need".
And now we need to define "need". Just about every electronic device you can purchase today has an embedded microcontroller with a fixed program. Clocks and watches have little computers inside them.
All cars need computers to manage their inner workings, and most of the world doesn't own a car but would like to. The average car has about 30 computers.
Has that been included in the calculations?
Computer time used to be metered. To take a course in college you were allocated a (generous for the application) number of CPU minutes to do your homework (both computer and non-computer classes). To do a study you were allocated a number of CPU minutes to use for the calculations.
Today, compute time is so cheap we don't to meter it - we meter the amount of electricity that is used, or the annoyance of keeping the hardware running.
How much computing would people use if they had access to an unlimited supply?
We don't really know, because we're still on the leading edge of the bell curve. We yet to saturate even one person's use of computing - we still don't have ubiquitous AI in self-driving cars and factories.
Article is stupid. It's impossible to answer the question today, and they're even asking the wrong questions.
I'm sure they already know this, but the algorithm isn't designed to trip up GOP politicians. It says a lot more about how they choose to phrase their message and talk about issues, than any agenda seeking to silence them on Twitter.
When what you post is designed to be inflammatory and lower discourse and a system designed to combat that properly flags it, maybe its working as intended and you should look inwards? No matter where you stand, there are good and bad ways to engage in discourse. On all topics, with all points of view.
Facebook blocked the political ads of Florida state representative Matt Caldwell, whose ad depicts Caldwell shooting a shotgun and talking about his support of the Second Amendment.
Everything about this ad was legal, appropriate, and not offensive in a violent, lurid, or sexual way. There was no innuendo or intent to deceive.
It's not "how they choose to phrase their message", it's the content, plain and simple.
Gun ownership has enough support in this nation to be a political issue that can be discussed, debated, and decided by the people.
If you are against gun ownership that's fine, but the political issue is legal and we should be talking about it.
Facebook is undermining the political process, the same way that the Russians did in *your* election.
Why does Facebook have to choose political sides at all?
Why can't their rules for allowed opinion be non political?
If you think for one second that Trump would go to war with China over Taiwan, you're delusional.
First, he doesn't even know the difference between the two. Second, he'll follow the money, which is China.
Whoosh...
Xi Jinping has made his ambitions very clear. And we will do nothing to stop it.
People will make shit up, and no one will call them on it.
Trump is most definitely the "pushback" president: he pushed back against North Korea, he's currently pushing back against Iran, he's pushing back against unfair trade practices from allies and adversaries, and he pushed back against terrorism by defeating ISIS.
He has no problem taking direct action to stop something, so I have to ask:
Where did you purchase your crystal ball?
Thanks - Good catch.
So I just read that Tesla asked for refunds from dealers in order to cover their debts. I suppose this is a lie as well?
That's not a lie, but it's a skewed interpretation of what actually happened.
Without posting my own explanation (which also might be skewed), do some digging into what actually happened, find a copy of the letter actually sent, and decide for yourself whether it's of any importance.
Someone else made a valid point about disclosing biases, so here is mine: I own Tesla stock, and I'm "long" on it.
I originally wanted to do some study of the stock market, and I purchased the stock to make the study "valuable" to me.
That turned out to be a lucky choice because Tesla is the hurricane eye of controversial stock market reporting. It's the perfect test case for deciding whether stock market news reports, statistics, and opinions have any informational value.
In any event, be aware that I own some shares and have an interest in seeing Tesla succeed.
But what does that tell us about the anonymous online troll, Okian Warrior, aka, Thomas Alexander Schnell.
Not cool, man.
Tesla has been hit with a torrent of fake news recently, trying to drive the stock down.
Most obviously and recently was the following:
1) Someone (not Tesla) posted that 23% of Tesla reservations have been cancelled.
2) Based on #1, an analyst downgraded the stock from "hold" to "underperform".
3) Tesla stock plummeted
4) Tesla notices #1 above and responded:
Dunno where this bs is coming from. Who knows about the future, but last week we had over 2000 S/X and 5000 Model 3 *new* net orders. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2018
(Note: Tesla makes about 6,000 cars/month, so an increase of 7000 cars puts them even further behind on reservations. And as noted in the link below, they have not started showing them in stores yet, so Tesla has yet to tap the "drive before they buy" potential pool of customers.)
Word on the street is that shorts are running scared, doing everything they can to drive down the stock price. Including insider sabotage, misleading financial spin, and online harassment such as the OP.
This is basically the last-ditch effort of Tesla bears to drive the stock down. Once the next two quarters financials are in, there will be no case for shorting Tesla stock whatsoever.
I don't think there's a conspiracy, but I *do* believe that, a few years ago, everyone sort of tacitly agreed that it would be good to have Russia as an enemy.
First (a couple of years ago) we heard about unspecified attacks on "critical infrastructure" by "Russian state-sponsored actors".
Then after the election it was "Russians meddled in the election", followed by "Russians hacked the election"
(It's on Wikipedia, so it must be true!) .
Then 17 intelligence agencies confirmed that the Russians hacked the election. Including, and I'm not making this up, Coast Guard Intelligence.
Thenn there is the infamous pee pee document
Of course the Mueller investigation is onto something, because... if there's nothing there why is Mueller still investigating?
Trump meeting with Putin is treason and...
Trump's treason was confirmed.
The thing is, the timing of the Steele dossier is inconsistent with the Russian narrative. If Hillary had known about the dossier during the campaign, she would have moved heaven and Earth to get it in the public eye before the election. The fact that she *didn't* implies that she was certain of winning the election, and the dossier was prepared for a different purpose.
There's no really good evidence that the Russian government is involved with any of the hacking, except to say "That's something they would do". It's the fallacy of the reversed conditional,
I think what we're seeing is a long-term narrative to (eventually) justify a conflict with Russia.
(Probably every response to this post will call me out as a Russian puppet, use foul insults, or predict Trump going to federal prison. Ignore those posts - the ones to read are ones that have a reasoned argument, citing facts, hopefully with links backing up facts, and painting a believable picture of an alternate explanation.)
Looking at the image from the OP, I have the following notes:
1) There is still a tiny bit of warmth in the color scheme. They should work to remove this last bit of friendliness to make the browser maximally cold and uninviting.
2) There is still too much contrast between the white background and window elements. For example, using Chrome I can still see where the slider is in its rail on the right-hand side of a website. The white background should be made softer (lower luminance), and the window elements should be a bit brighter (higher luminance) to bring them closer together.
3) There are only 12 incomprehensible icons on the address bar line, to the right of the address bar. The screen needs more googaws, curios, gimcracks, and oddities to function properly. Addresses and/or search fields are of less importance so make the address field narrower so that the search terms are never fully shown, in favor of more gizmos and thingamajigs.
4) The red, orange, and green dots on the upper left are a nice touch. In reference to "Demolition Man", maybe change these to three seashells?
Just trying to be helpful...