Given the problem with PSN in the last few days, it appears there's no viable option left but use the PS3 as an offline gaming machine, an ordinary Blu-ray player or maybe a space heater:-)
It makes a fantastic space heater, easily rivaling the Power Mac G5 Quad I have upstairs, which can actually be used to heat the whole upstairs of our house just by having it transcode a video.
I make sure to turn off the power switch on the back of our PS3 after shutting it down, as there were many times I would come into the living room to find the PS3 running its fans at full speed and blasting out heat - hours after it had been shut down. I don't really care to know what it was doing, I just wanted it to stay "off".
"it’s two times as hard, six times lighter and ten times higher in tensile strength"
Well, to the materials scientists I work with, those words sound like advertising more than useful information.
Two times as hard as steel. Steel in what condition? There is a very wide variety of steel alloys, and these can be heat treated to be as whatever hardness is necessary. Find a piece of mild steel (the kind of stuff you might find at the hardware store) and try to scratch it with something hard. You can scratch it pretty easily, but try again on a piece of stainless steel cutlery and you'll probably find it quite a bit more difficult. Both are steel.
Six times lighter. Per unit volume? Ok, but how do the other characteristics compare given the same volume? Or given the same weight? The article doesn't give any real detail or any frame of reference.
Ten times higher in tensile strength - again, if you want to compare to steel you need to give the alloy grade (grade refers to composition, not quality), and the heat treatment - anyone who's bought nuts and bolts at the hardware store has noticed that these metal items are available in different strength grades even within the same basic metal family.
Those claims sound just like those given for aluminum - it's lighter (per unit volume), stronger (per unit weight), etc. But, in service, where toughness (ie. impact resistance, the ability to deform plastically before fracturing, etc), steel beats aluminum hands down.
Not that I'm a big fan of steel or anything, it's just that these comparisons are often incomplete and therefore meaningless. It's too bad the article writer didn't include any actual mechanical property values.
The reason why this is so novel is not the power of the laser, but it's size, timing and durability. It'll be interesting to see if NASCAR allows it, as efficiency is a big part of winning that closely regulated league.
Ummm... The mass-market car manufacturers abandoned carburetors for fuel injection back in 1987, yet NASCAR is still just thinking about using fuel injection maybe in 2012.
I think you can safely forget about laser ignition systems in NASCAR for a good long time after they're available in regular production cars. While NASCAR cars have been refined over the decades, they are still not using very much technology that would have been unfamiliar to a regular car mechanic in the late 1970s.
Now, if you'd said Formula 1, then that would make sense.
I wonder if you'll be able to./configure, make, make install programs written on this small computer? That would make it something worth shouting about...
The question you should be asking yourself is, "Why would I buy a product that lacks a feature that I want?"
If you want a cool looking phone, that can play angry birds, and that you can install your own stuff on, get an Android-based phone, not an iPhone.
Cell phones have been small computers for a very long time now, and have all had varying degrees of lockdown.
Heck, I had one of the first phones with a color screen and Verizon forced you to hack into it just to load your own pictures into it.
You want to get worked up about lockdown when there are other non-locked-down choices available? That's just pointless.
There is a certain cutoff year where most of the pre-whatever drives are aluminum platter and the post-whatever drives are glass platter.
This does not seem to be true across all manufacturers. I dismantle all of our drives before disposal, and I've only come across glass platters in laptop drives (they seem to have been glass all the way back to the early 1990s, the earliest one I disassembled was from 1992 and had glass platters). All of the 3.5" drives have had aluminum platters, from the cheap 5400 RPM drives to 10000 RPM drives from servers.
It's possible that some manufacturers use glass platters in certain model lines of drives, but there doesn't seem to be an industry-wide changeover to glass platters. I have a stack of aluminum platters here to prove it - the most recent from a drive manufactured in mid-2010.
Because modern drives have glass platters and the gunshot shatters them into millions of pieces.
A drive from the 80's and early 90's? yes.
A drive from the past few years? no.
I dismantle every drive that we are getting rid of, usually about five a year.
So far, the only glass platters have been in laptop drives. The most recent 3.5" drive was from 2010, and had aluminum platters. The laptop drives seem to have had glass platters all the way back to the early 1990s.
In the days of the Concorde, if you could afford to fly from NYC to Paris, you could afford to do it on a supersonic luxury jet. Everyone else had to schlep along on the ground. Now, ordinary joes can afford to fly, and they provide relentless downward cost pressure, making fast-but-ineffecient things like Concorde unprofitable.
I would like to see someone travel on the ground from NYC to Paris. At some point during the journey, a car is going to lose traction due to the depth of the water in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Concorde tickets cost three to ten times the price of a subsonic flight. To say that if someone can afford a $1000 subsonic flight, then they can also afford a $10,000 supersonic flight is just silly.
I'm not sure where you live, but in the USA the 55 MPH limit is largely gone. I've been flying on jet aircraft since the mid 1970s (at similar speeds to today's air transport), and so have millions of others, so I'm not sure what your point is. Somehow losing the peak travel speeds of a small number of travels whilst not raising the travel speeds of the masses raises the average travel speed?
... when the Chinese president call the White House and say: "Tell Sony to drop this BS, or we will call back ALL Treasury bonds". When that day comes, DMCA will be repealed quickly, and a new patent/copyright reform will come.
Sony is a Japanese company, not American. Of all of Sony's business units, Sony Computer Entertainment America would be an unlikely choice to go after someone in China. It's entirely possible that Sony has a division located somewhere in Asia - that division might try to get the Japanese and Chinese governments involved, but it's not clear why you'd think America would be involved. Maybe you got your wires crossed a little.
Or, the USA can always print $1 trillion and pay back the Chinese. Then we will have inflation -> Civil War -> Constitution suspended -> No DMCA.
Yeah, right. I think you may be in a strange mental state where you're dreaming, but you're still able to interact with the real world. Try pinching yourself to see if you wake up.
Your analogy doesn't work. In some cases, it is illegal to modify something you own. Going with the weapon theme, a sawed-off shotgun comes to mind. Even if you have a legitimate reason to make the modification, it's still illegal, in the US, to reduce the length of a shotgun to less than 26" overall and an 18" barrel. Doesn't matter if such a modification could make the weapon more useful during legal use.
Wait a minute - you're comparing wanting to use product features that were advertised by the manufacturer and then taken away, to something that is specifically prohibited by Federal law?
Shotguns are not advertised as having the feature of being able to saw off the barrels to a shorter length. Many people do saw off the barrels to the legal length, but no shotgun manufacturer advertises this as a selling point, regardless of how useful it might be.
Sony advertised that the PS3 product could both run "Other Operating Systems" such as linux, and it could also use the PlayStation Network. Those are both useful features, and they are not violations of Federal law (which your shotgun example would be).
They then updated the software on the product (PS3) such that you could either choose to retain the Other OS functionality, or the PSN functionality, but not both. That is stealing, or if it's not, it's at least the intentional introduction of a defect into the product. Customers should either retain all the advertised functionality of the product, or be compensated for the loss of that functionality.
Here's a car analogy:
You buy a new Toyota Boringmobile. It gets cold where you live, so you buy it based on Toyota advertising that it has heated seats. They also advertise that is has the ability to safely transport you and your family from place to place. Those are two advertised features: 1. Safe transportation, 2. heated seats.
You pay money for the car. Toyota gives you title to, and possession of, the car. You drive it home. You are happy.
Toyota sends you a notice: "Bring your Boringmobile into any Toyota dealership for a free service to make sure it continues to fulfill it's promise of safe (if rather dull) transportation". There's a recall on the tires or something like that.
You visit your Toyota dealership, and they replace the tires with new ones which work exactly like the old ones, but you needed to do that for safety's sake - Toyota's notice to you more or less said so. At the same time, Toyota disables the heated seats.
Wait a minute! You paid for heated seats! But they don't work any more. Toyota says "Well, you agreed to that in the terms of service - it was on page 38 of the agreement you agreed to by driving to the dealership"
But wait a minute, contract law doesn't work like that - they can't take features back without compensating you (Generally in a contract, "consideration" i.e. money, has to change hands in exchange for taking or providing goods and/or services). You take Toyota to court (most likely as part of a class action), and get either money or your heated seat functionality back.
What has happened here is that Sony has stolen functionality from the owners of a physical product that was bought and paid for.
The proper shotgun analogy is that you had a double-barreled shotgun and you could shoot both barrels, or just use them to store two shotgun rounds if you chose to never fire the shotgun. After an update, your Sony shotgun will now only fire the first barrel. The second barrel is now just for storing a spare round. Don't like that your gun doesn't work as advertised any more? Sorry, it had to be done so that you could continue to use Sony ammunition. Except that it didn't, did it?
You might be surprised how many conversations at the proverbial water cooler center on some new television ad campaign. Of course, it's often easy to waylay those into more interesting topics, such as honey badgers.
Wow.
You know, you can watch many commercials on Youtube.
Actually the electronic throttles are more reliable than cables. Cables have been known to snap, or have the ends come off (which is basically the same thing.)
As to responsiveness, you probably should have bought a car designed for that, rather than the automotive equivalent of a washing machine. My car has an electronic throttle, and I'm sometimes surprised how responsive it is, but it's not a boring transportation appliance like a Toyota. Toyotas are very reliable, but also reliably boring.
The separation of the control mechanism from the actual throttle valve also allows the carmaker to engineer the feel of the pedal, and do smart things like close the throttle for traction control and blip the throttle open slightly for downshifts. Brake override so that the throttle won't open if you're pressing on the brake pedal (or have the parking brake engaged) is possible too. Neither of those things can be done with a mechanical linkage or cable - the engine controls would have been limited to tricks like reducing power by retarding the ignition timing.
The Bose system was electrohydraulic. Pretty much all of the active suspensions systems have been electrohydraulic.
Supplier says "pay us $20k for a hammer and we'll throw in $15k of spare helicopter parts."
That's not how it works at all.
You want some helicopter parts thrown in? The military guys know to not even try that. That's not what happens at all. Everyone is covering their asses. If some military helicopter part fails, you can bet that the procurement chain will be examined. There has to be a paper trail for everything.
Supplier says "pay us $20k for your crazy over-spec'ed* hammer, and we'll jump through your stupid purchasing hoops, go through all kinds of extra work certifying things that have nothing to do with the performance of the item, fill out reams of unnecessary paperwork, send an employee to a special course so they can learn how to enter invoices in your arcane billing system (btw, commercial invoice ~1 page, government invoice ~30 pages), wait thirty days for our first billing to be rejected because of some minor issue (100% chance first billing is rejected, btw), submit corrected billing, wait 30 days for someone to tell us that the contract was shifted to another department and so it has to be resubmitted again (they knew 2 days after we billed them, but they're not required to respond until 30 days, so they don't), wait another 30 days to find that the billing was accepted, then wait 60 days for the payment to show up".
Many companies turn government business away, because the documentation requirements are onerous, the payment terms are ridiculous, and the project may be cancelled halfway through anyway.
*The requirements on military items would make your head spin. Making a tiny design change to a part to make it easier and cheaper to manufacture can trigger everything from having three government people sign off on the revised drawing all the way to having to run a live fire test at some proving ground where they strap your whatever it is to a tank and drive it around, attach it to whatever gun it's supposed to work with and fire 1000 rounds, or shoot at it, depending on what it is. All for a really minor change that was never going to affect how it worked in the first place.
You may think a $20k hammer is ridiculous, and it is, but once you see the paper and testing trail, it starts to look reasonable, assuming it's not an off-the-shelf-item (very few are). Now, if they're buying more than 10 hammers, that price had better come down, but for a one-off, $20k is a bargain. Heck, it'd probably win an award for cost savings.
Wait, he works as a tax assessor for the government, and they call that "welfare"? Do we call corporate accountants "beggars" now too because they accept hand-outs from corporations for their whole life?
No, collecting a paycheck from a government job whilst at the same time complaining that you're anti-government and anti-spending is called hypocrisy.
They say the cars didn't break down. Take note: cars. Top Gear claimed on-air that not only did both require recharging (Tesla also says neither ran out of charge), but that they both broke down. Tesla says that's a fabrication.
One car's motor overheated and basically shut down, "reduced power" was what Clarkson said when it happened. The other car's brakes failed.
Those are failures, regardless if they were temporary or not.
The problem is, Top Gear tests cars as though they are going to be driven on "track days" which are basically amateur racing where the cars are pushed hard for a long time - totally unlike the real-world road driving most people do. Most mass-market cars would suffer brake failures or other problems when used this way.
Frankly, given that Top Gear tests cars on their track the way they do, the review was pretty balanced. They showed that although the Tesla didn't handle quite as well as the Lotus that it's based on, it could out-accelerate the Lotus on the straights.
On almost every episode of Top Gear there is a multi-hundred-thousand dollar (up to millions of dollars) car sliding around the test track, being pushed to its limits in ways that no street driven car would be. The Tesla, like many cars, isn't built to take it. Would you be upset if your $2,000,000 Bugatti suffered the same problems? Yes. Would you even be surprised if a $20,000 Honda's engine overheated or brakes failed when driven that way for an extended time? No. The issue is that the "real world" Clarkson was talking about was on their track, not on public roads.
The Tesla is built to be a sporty car, but not a race car. There are some cars that can take abuse all day long and do just fine, and some that can't. There's nothing wrong with that. When I owned a Porsche I was able to drive the car very hard all day long and then drive it home as though nothing had happened. My V8 Camaro could beat the Porsche in a drag race (wouldn't come close on a corner though) but it would have ended up ruined given a day of the same treatment the Porsche took.
Top Gear has also driven a Prius around their track as fast as possible, with a V8 BMW M3 following it to prove that hybrids aren't the end-all of fuel economy (the BMW got far better gas mileage because the Prius was never designed to be driven on a track). The same type of driving is a recipe for using up 100% of an electric car's charge pretty quickly, and given that type of usage, the comments about recharge time are valid. But, if you just want to drive sedately to work and back, the Prius is going to get much better gas mileage than the M3.
Sending a "performance" car to Top Gear that isn't designed for the rigors of track use is guaranteed to result in a bad review. It's not like they're doing bland consumer reviews of family cars like PBS' Motor Week.
Sometime the Tesla guys should watch the review of the Bentley where one of the rear tires explodes, and think themselves lucky. Heck, the seats in one Mercedes-Benz (an AMG Black model) were compared unfavorably to a pile of rocks. You don't see M-B complaining.
I have one of these devices. It's plugged into a port on a managed switch and doesn't see any of my traffic; basically it has access to the Internet connection and that's it.
Video streaming in seconds to buffer and seconds of delay
Downstream throughput in Mbps
Upstream throughput in Mbps
DNS response time in milliseconds
Failed web requests in %
Failed DNS requests in %
RTP Packet Loss in %
RTP Jitter in milliseconds
All these stats are graphed daily.
I have U-Verse, and the instructions state that with U-Verse you just plug the device into a switch port and plug nothing else into it. They probably don't want the U-Verse video traffic running through it. I also disabled its wifi, since it wasn't necessary.
Notice every one of your sentences starts with 'I' except for all the bits where Amazon is involved which you seemed to have excluded. I doubt the courts will be so willing to ignore that Amazon IS in the picture.
There are two parties involved.
Amazon is not "excluded" from that example:
I replace the dedicated VM with an account on someone else's system, is this legal?
Amazon is the "someone else". They're renting you virtual space on a virtual system. By your logic, you can't store music in a rented apartment because the landlord is involved. Any judge or jury would say that you can do that.
If you have a concrete that can set in that environment, and maintain integrity versus the decay heat that under that blanket of concrete, you should be up for a Nobel Prize.
You mean something like concrete made with hydraulic refractory cement? You can even pump it into place through a pipe.
Can I have the prize sent to me, or do I have to go and get it?
I disable the touch-to-click on trackpads, because I'll be typing and some part of one of my hands will hit the trackpad and the cursor jumps somewhere or clicks a button or something.
Under OSX the Apple trackpads don't do that unless you enable Tap to Click, since the entire pad is also a mechanical button - so the cursor doesn't move if you inadvertently touch the trackpad unless you press it hard enough to also operate the mechanical switch. The older trackpads with the separate click button didn't do Tap to Click by default, either, since it's a feature that annoys as many people as those who like it.
You can designate a two-finger click to do the same thing as a right-click, or designate one of the lower (ie. the right or left) corners to operate as a right-click, or both, or neither (for old-timers who think ctrl-click is a good idea; it isn't, but it's still supported).
*Vehicles already have odometers, and don't all states require periodic emissions inspections? If they really wanted to tax based on actual miles traveled, they can just copy down the mileage then.
Only areas that are non-attainment or borderline on air quality require periodic emissions inspections and not always for all cars.
In my state, because the air quality is good enough, cars over a certain age do not require emissions tests if they passed a test previously. Some very old cars were never inspected (although this tends to be antique cars that are not driven a lot). Cars under four years old are not tested either. Many of the rural counties are not required to have vehicle emissions testing either, because the population density is low and the gradual phase-in of modern cars have helped keep the air clean.
There is no safety inspection here either - the logic is that most of the time these are a waste of time and money as most people are afraid of killing someone with an unsafe vehicle. Heavy trucks are inspected for safety, but not passenger cars and light trucks (under 16,000 lb, which can be just a large pickup truck).
I do think it's a great way to level the playing field between gas guzzlers (the ones that tear up the road the most) and more efficient vehicles. How dare the less wasteful, lighter footprint vehicles get a tax advantage!
Gas taxes have always apportioned the road tax unfairly, so they probably shouldn't be the only solution (other than some really basic models, highly efficient cars have tended to cost more than cars of average efficiency, so poor people tend not to have the most efficient cars), but how do you know that lighter vehicles cause less wear on the roads? Do you have a paper on this you can point us to, or is this assertion just based on a feeling?
Certainly a heavy truck will cause more wear than a passenger car - but what about a small car compared to a mid-sized car, or even a sports car with a powerful engine?
On a more powerful car which has larger, wider tires, the weight per unit of tire contact area on the road could (pounds per square inch, or N/m^2) actually be lower than in a small car with narrow low-rolling-resistance tires. Rolling resistance is reduced in tires by making the tires harder and by reducing the size of the contact patch between the tire and the road - a recipe for increased road wear if the efficient car is not drastically lighter than the normal car. The Prius weighs more than some sports cars with much more powerful engines, (certain Porsche 911 models come to mind), but the Porsche cars have much larger tire contact patches.
Assuming the tires are not actually spinning on the road surface, could not the larger (or just more powerful and less efficient per mile traveled) car actually be wearing the road surface less than the smaller car?
Slashdot Mirror
Given the problem with PSN in the last few days, it appears there's no viable option left but use the PS3 as an offline gaming machine, an ordinary Blu-ray player or maybe a space heater :-)
It makes a fantastic space heater, easily rivaling the Power Mac G5 Quad I have upstairs, which can actually be used to heat the whole upstairs of our house just by having it transcode a video.
I make sure to turn off the power switch on the back of our PS3 after shutting it down, as there were many times I would come into the living room to find the PS3 running its fans at full speed and blasting out heat - hours after it had been shut down. I don't really care to know what it was doing, I just wanted it to stay "off".
"it’s two times as hard, six times lighter and ten times higher in tensile strength"
Well, to the materials scientists I work with, those words sound like advertising more than useful information.
Two times as hard as steel. Steel in what condition? There is a very wide variety of steel alloys, and these can be heat treated to be as whatever hardness is necessary. Find a piece of mild steel (the kind of stuff you might find at the hardware store) and try to scratch it with something hard. You can scratch it pretty easily, but try again on a piece of stainless steel cutlery and you'll probably find it quite a bit more difficult. Both are steel.
Six times lighter. Per unit volume? Ok, but how do the other characteristics compare given the same volume? Or given the same weight? The article doesn't give any real detail or any frame of reference.
Ten times higher in tensile strength - again, if you want to compare to steel you need to give the alloy grade (grade refers to composition, not quality), and the heat treatment - anyone who's bought nuts and bolts at the hardware store has noticed that these metal items are available in different strength grades even within the same basic metal family.
Those claims sound just like those given for aluminum - it's lighter (per unit volume), stronger (per unit weight), etc. But, in service, where toughness (ie. impact resistance, the ability to deform plastically before fracturing, etc), steel beats aluminum hands down.
Not that I'm a big fan of steel or anything, it's just that these comparisons are often incomplete and therefore meaningless. It's too bad the article writer didn't include any actual mechanical property values.
The reason why this is so novel is not the power of the laser, but it's size, timing and durability. It'll be interesting to see if NASCAR allows it, as efficiency is a big part of winning that closely regulated league.
Ummm... The mass-market car manufacturers abandoned carburetors for fuel injection back in 1987, yet NASCAR is still just thinking about using fuel injection maybe in 2012.
I think you can safely forget about laser ignition systems in NASCAR for a good long time after they're available in regular production cars. While NASCAR cars have been refined over the decades, they are still not using very much technology that would have been unfamiliar to a regular car mechanic in the late 1970s.
Now, if you'd said Formula 1, then that would make sense.
I wonder if you'll be able to ./configure, make, make install programs written on this small computer? That would make it something worth shouting about...
The question you should be asking yourself is, "Why would I buy a product that lacks a feature that I want?"
If you want a cool looking phone, that can play angry birds, and that you can install your own stuff on, get an Android-based phone, not an iPhone.
Cell phones have been small computers for a very long time now, and have all had varying degrees of lockdown.
Heck, I had one of the first phones with a color screen and Verizon forced you to hack into it just to load your own pictures into it.
You want to get worked up about lockdown when there are other non-locked-down choices available? That's just pointless.
There is a certain cutoff year where most of the pre-whatever drives are aluminum platter and the post-whatever drives are glass platter.
This does not seem to be true across all manufacturers. I dismantle all of our drives before disposal, and I've only come across glass platters in laptop drives (they seem to have been glass all the way back to the early 1990s, the earliest one I disassembled was from 1992 and had glass platters). All of the 3.5" drives have had aluminum platters, from the cheap 5400 RPM drives to 10000 RPM drives from servers.
It's possible that some manufacturers use glass platters in certain model lines of drives, but there doesn't seem to be an industry-wide changeover to glass platters. I have a stack of aluminum platters here to prove it - the most recent from a drive manufactured in mid-2010.
Really, you have? On a modern drive?
Because modern drives have glass platters and the gunshot shatters them into millions of pieces.
A drive from the 80's and early 90's? yes.
A drive from the past few years? no.
I dismantle every drive that we are getting rid of, usually about five a year.
So far, the only glass platters have been in laptop drives. The most recent 3.5" drive was from 2010, and had aluminum platters. The laptop drives seem to have had glass platters all the way back to the early 1990s.
In the days of the Concorde, if you could afford to fly from NYC to Paris, you could afford to do it on a supersonic luxury jet. Everyone else had to schlep along on the ground. Now, ordinary joes can afford to fly, and they provide relentless downward cost pressure, making fast-but-ineffecient things like Concorde unprofitable.
I would like to see someone travel on the ground from NYC to Paris. At some point during the journey, a car is going to lose traction due to the depth of the water in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Concorde tickets cost three to ten times the price of a subsonic flight. To say that if someone can afford a $1000 subsonic flight, then they can also afford a $10,000 supersonic flight is just silly.
I'm not sure where you live, but in the USA the 55 MPH limit is largely gone. I've been flying on jet aircraft since the mid 1970s (at similar speeds to today's air transport), and so have millions of others, so I'm not sure what your point is. Somehow losing the peak travel speeds of a small number of travels whilst not raising the travel speeds of the masses raises the average travel speed?
... when the Chinese president call the White House and say: "Tell Sony to drop this BS, or we will call back ALL Treasury bonds". When that day comes, DMCA will be repealed quickly, and a new patent/copyright reform will come.
Sony is a Japanese company, not American. Of all of Sony's business units, Sony Computer Entertainment America would be an unlikely choice to go after someone in China. It's entirely possible that Sony has a division located somewhere in Asia - that division might try to get the Japanese and Chinese governments involved, but it's not clear why you'd think America would be involved. Maybe you got your wires crossed a little.
Or, the USA can always print $1 trillion and pay back the Chinese. Then we will have inflation -> Civil War -> Constitution suspended -> No DMCA.
Yeah, right. I think you may be in a strange mental state where you're dreaming, but you're still able to interact with the real world. Try pinching yourself to see if you wake up.
Your analogy doesn't work. In some cases, it is illegal to modify something you own. Going with the weapon theme, a sawed-off shotgun comes to mind. Even if you have a legitimate reason to make the modification, it's still illegal, in the US, to reduce the length of a shotgun to less than 26" overall and an 18" barrel. Doesn't matter if such a modification could make the weapon more useful during legal use.
Wait a minute - you're comparing wanting to use product features that were advertised by the manufacturer and then taken away, to something that is specifically prohibited by Federal law?
Shotguns are not advertised as having the feature of being able to saw off the barrels to a shorter length. Many people do saw off the barrels to the legal length, but no shotgun manufacturer advertises this as a selling point, regardless of how useful it might be.
Sony advertised that the PS3 product could both run "Other Operating Systems" such as linux, and it could also use the PlayStation Network. Those are both useful features, and they are not violations of Federal law (which your shotgun example would be).
They then updated the software on the product (PS3) such that you could either choose to retain the Other OS functionality, or the PSN functionality, but not both. That is stealing, or if it's not, it's at least the intentional introduction of a defect into the product. Customers should either retain all the advertised functionality of the product, or be compensated for the loss of that functionality.
Here's a car analogy:
You buy a new Toyota Boringmobile. It gets cold where you live, so you buy it based on Toyota advertising that it has heated seats. They also advertise that is has the ability to safely transport you and your family from place to place. Those are two advertised features: 1. Safe transportation, 2. heated seats.
You pay money for the car. Toyota gives you title to, and possession of, the car. You drive it home. You are happy.
Toyota sends you a notice: "Bring your Boringmobile into any Toyota dealership for a free service to make sure it continues to fulfill it's promise of safe (if rather dull) transportation". There's a recall on the tires or something like that.
You visit your Toyota dealership, and they replace the tires with new ones which work exactly like the old ones, but you needed to do that for safety's sake - Toyota's notice to you more or less said so. At the same time, Toyota disables the heated seats.
Wait a minute! You paid for heated seats! But they don't work any more. Toyota says "Well, you agreed to that in the terms of service - it was on page 38 of the agreement you agreed to by driving to the dealership"
But wait a minute, contract law doesn't work like that - they can't take features back without compensating you (Generally in a contract, "consideration" i.e. money, has to change hands in exchange for taking or providing goods and/or services). You take Toyota to court (most likely as part of a class action), and get either money or your heated seat functionality back.
What has happened here is that Sony has stolen functionality from the owners of a physical product that was bought and paid for.
The proper shotgun analogy is that you had a double-barreled shotgun and you could shoot both barrels, or just use them to store two shotgun rounds if you chose to never fire the shotgun. After an update, your Sony shotgun will now only fire the first barrel. The second barrel is now just for storing a spare round. Don't like that your gun doesn't work as advertised any more? Sorry, it had to be done so that you could continue to use Sony ammunition. Except that it didn't, did it?
Nope, this isn't quite the same thing. Of course, if you'd read the article, you'd know that, so I guess I shouldn't expect too much...
I read both articles; they describe the same machine, and both articles point to the same website, www.commodoreusa.net
It's the same damn thing.
Of course, if you'd read and understood both articles, you'd know that, so I guess I shouldn't expect too much...
Covered a while back, here: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/03/24/0625211/Commodore-64-Primed-For-a-Comeback-In-June.
It's just another article covering the same machine discussed previously.
You might be surprised how many conversations at the proverbial water cooler center on some new television ad campaign. Of course, it's often easy to waylay those into more interesting topics, such as honey badgers.
Wow.
You know, you can watch many commercials on Youtube.
Actually the electronic throttles are more reliable than cables. Cables have been known to snap, or have the ends come off (which is basically the same thing.)
As to responsiveness, you probably should have bought a car designed for that, rather than the automotive equivalent of a washing machine. My car has an electronic throttle, and I'm sometimes surprised how responsive it is, but it's not a boring transportation appliance like a Toyota. Toyotas are very reliable, but also reliably boring.
The separation of the control mechanism from the actual throttle valve also allows the carmaker to engineer the feel of the pedal, and do smart things like close the throttle for traction control and blip the throttle open slightly for downshifts. Brake override so that the throttle won't open if you're pressing on the brake pedal (or have the parking brake engaged) is possible too. Neither of those things can be done with a mechanical linkage or cable - the engine controls would have been limited to tricks like reducing power by retarding the ignition timing.
The Bose system was electrohydraulic. Pretty much all of the active suspensions systems have been electrohydraulic.
Am I the only one who seemed to have RTFA and noticed that they're hiring women coders only?
Well, since it actually says:
All new applicants will be naturists and could be males or females
It sounds like the author was just trying to make the article more sensational.
Supplier says "pay us $20k for a hammer and we'll throw in $15k of spare helicopter parts."
That's not how it works at all.
You want some helicopter parts thrown in? The military guys know to not even try that. That's not what happens at all. Everyone is covering their asses. If some military helicopter part fails, you can bet that the procurement chain will be examined. There has to be a paper trail for everything.
Supplier says "pay us $20k for your crazy over-spec'ed* hammer, and we'll jump through your stupid purchasing hoops, go through all kinds of extra work certifying things that have nothing to do with the performance of the item, fill out reams of unnecessary paperwork, send an employee to a special course so they can learn how to enter invoices in your arcane billing system (btw, commercial invoice ~1 page, government invoice ~30 pages), wait thirty days for our first billing to be rejected because of some minor issue (100% chance first billing is rejected, btw), submit corrected billing, wait 30 days for someone to tell us that the contract was shifted to another department and so it has to be resubmitted again (they knew 2 days after we billed them, but they're not required to respond until 30 days, so they don't), wait another 30 days to find that the billing was accepted, then wait 60 days for the payment to show up".
Many companies turn government business away, because the documentation requirements are onerous, the payment terms are ridiculous, and the project may be cancelled halfway through anyway.
*The requirements on military items would make your head spin. Making a tiny design change to a part to make it easier and cheaper to manufacture can trigger everything from having three government people sign off on the revised drawing all the way to having to run a live fire test at some proving ground where they strap your whatever it is to a tank and drive it around, attach it to whatever gun it's supposed to work with and fire 1000 rounds, or shoot at it, depending on what it is. All for a really minor change that was never going to affect how it worked in the first place.
You may think a $20k hammer is ridiculous, and it is, but once you see the paper and testing trail, it starts to look reasonable, assuming it's not an off-the-shelf-item (very few are). Now, if they're buying more than 10 hammers, that price had better come down, but for a one-off, $20k is a bargain. Heck, it'd probably win an award for cost savings.
Wait, he works as a tax assessor for the government, and they call that "welfare"? Do we call corporate accountants "beggars" now too because they accept hand-outs from corporations for their whole life?
No, collecting a paycheck from a government job whilst at the same time complaining that you're anti-government and anti-spending is called hypocrisy.
They say the cars didn't break down. Take note: cars. Top Gear claimed on-air that not only did both require recharging (Tesla also says neither ran out of charge), but that they both broke down. Tesla says that's a fabrication.
One car's motor overheated and basically shut down, "reduced power" was what Clarkson said when it happened. The other car's brakes failed.
Those are failures, regardless if they were temporary or not.
The problem is, Top Gear tests cars as though they are going to be driven on "track days" which are basically amateur racing where the cars are pushed hard for a long time - totally unlike the real-world road driving most people do. Most mass-market cars would suffer brake failures or other problems when used this way.
Frankly, given that Top Gear tests cars on their track the way they do, the review was pretty balanced. They showed that although the Tesla didn't handle quite as well as the Lotus that it's based on, it could out-accelerate the Lotus on the straights.
On almost every episode of Top Gear there is a multi-hundred-thousand dollar (up to millions of dollars) car sliding around the test track, being pushed to its limits in ways that no street driven car would be. The Tesla, like many cars, isn't built to take it. Would you be upset if your $2,000,000 Bugatti suffered the same problems? Yes. Would you even be surprised if a $20,000 Honda's engine overheated or brakes failed when driven that way for an extended time? No. The issue is that the "real world" Clarkson was talking about was on their track, not on public roads.
The Tesla is built to be a sporty car, but not a race car. There are some cars that can take abuse all day long and do just fine, and some that can't. There's nothing wrong with that. When I owned a Porsche I was able to drive the car very hard all day long and then drive it home as though nothing had happened. My V8 Camaro could beat the Porsche in a drag race (wouldn't come close on a corner though) but it would have ended up ruined given a day of the same treatment the Porsche took.
Top Gear has also driven a Prius around their track as fast as possible, with a V8 BMW M3 following it to prove that hybrids aren't the end-all of fuel economy (the BMW got far better gas mileage because the Prius was never designed to be driven on a track). The same type of driving is a recipe for using up 100% of an electric car's charge pretty quickly, and given that type of usage, the comments about recharge time are valid. But, if you just want to drive sedately to work and back, the Prius is going to get much better gas mileage than the M3.
Sending a "performance" car to Top Gear that isn't designed for the rigors of track use is guaranteed to result in a bad review. It's not like they're doing bland consumer reviews of family cars like PBS' Motor Week.
Sometime the Tesla guys should watch the review of the Bentley where one of the rear tires explodes, and think themselves lucky. Heck, the seats in one Mercedes-Benz (an AMG Black model) were compared unfavorably to a pile of rocks. You don't see M-B complaining.
Forget that it also graphs VoIP Call Jitter, up and down in milliseconds.
Presumably these stats are the results of its own testing, as I'm not using VoIP.
I have one of these devices. It's plugged into a port on a managed switch and doesn't see any of my traffic; basically it has access to the Internet connection and that's it.
There's a site at http://reporting.samknows.com/ that I can log into and see graphs of the test results, which are:
All these stats are graphed daily.
I have U-Verse, and the instructions state that with U-Verse you just plug the device into a switch port and plug nothing else into it. They probably don't want the U-Verse video traffic running through it. I also disabled its wifi, since it wasn't necessary.
Notice every one of your sentences starts with 'I' except for all the bits where Amazon is involved which you seemed to have excluded. I doubt the courts will be so willing to ignore that Amazon IS in the picture.
There are two parties involved.
Amazon is not "excluded" from that example:
I replace the dedicated VM with an account on someone else's system, is this legal?
Amazon is the "someone else". They're renting you virtual space on a virtual system. By your logic, you can't store music in a rented apartment because the landlord is involved. Any judge or jury would say that you can do that.
If you have a concrete that can set in that environment, and maintain integrity versus the decay heat that under that blanket of concrete, you should be up for a Nobel Prize.
You mean something like concrete made with hydraulic refractory cement? You can even pump it into place through a pipe.
Can I have the prize sent to me, or do I have to go and get it?
I disable the touch-to-click on trackpads, because I'll be typing and some part of one of my hands will hit the trackpad and the cursor jumps somewhere or clicks a button or something.
Under OSX the Apple trackpads don't do that unless you enable Tap to Click, since the entire pad is also a mechanical button - so the cursor doesn't move if you inadvertently touch the trackpad unless you press it hard enough to also operate the mechanical switch. The older trackpads with the separate click button didn't do Tap to Click by default, either, since it's a feature that annoys as many people as those who like it.
You can designate a two-finger click to do the same thing as a right-click, or designate one of the lower (ie. the right or left) corners to operate as a right-click, or both, or neither (for old-timers who think ctrl-click is a good idea; it isn't, but it's still supported).
Taxes never go away. By that logic the income tax will have historically always gone up or stayed the same, and never gone down.
Going down is not the same thing as going away.
*Vehicles already have odometers, and don't all states require periodic emissions inspections? If they really wanted to tax based on actual miles traveled, they can just copy down the mileage then.
Only areas that are non-attainment or borderline on air quality require periodic emissions inspections and not always for all cars.
In my state, because the air quality is good enough, cars over a certain age do not require emissions tests if they passed a test previously. Some very old cars were never inspected (although this tends to be antique cars that are not driven a lot). Cars under four years old are not tested either. Many of the rural counties are not required to have vehicle emissions testing either, because the population density is low and the gradual phase-in of modern cars have helped keep the air clean.
There is no safety inspection here either - the logic is that most of the time these are a waste of time and money as most people are afraid of killing someone with an unsafe vehicle. Heavy trucks are inspected for safety, but not passenger cars and light trucks (under 16,000 lb, which can be just a large pickup truck).
I do think it's a great way to level the playing field between gas guzzlers (the ones that tear up the road the most) and more efficient vehicles. How dare the less wasteful, lighter footprint vehicles get a tax advantage!
Gas taxes have always apportioned the road tax unfairly, so they probably shouldn't be the only solution (other than some really basic models, highly efficient cars have tended to cost more than cars of average efficiency, so poor people tend not to have the most efficient cars), but how do you know that lighter vehicles cause less wear on the roads? Do you have a paper on this you can point us to, or is this assertion just based on a feeling?
Certainly a heavy truck will cause more wear than a passenger car - but what about a small car compared to a mid-sized car, or even a sports car with a powerful engine?
On a more powerful car which has larger, wider tires, the weight per unit of tire contact area on the road could (pounds per square inch, or N/m^2) actually be lower than in a small car with narrow low-rolling-resistance tires. Rolling resistance is reduced in tires by making the tires harder and by reducing the size of the contact patch between the tire and the road - a recipe for increased road wear if the efficient car is not drastically lighter than the normal car. The Prius weighs more than some sports cars with much more powerful engines, (certain Porsche 911 models come to mind), but the Porsche cars have much larger tire contact patches.
Assuming the tires are not actually spinning on the road surface, could not the larger (or just more powerful and less efficient per mile traveled) car actually be wearing the road surface less than the smaller car?