My prophecy: Self driving cars will be better than humans in 99,99% of the situations within 3 years. Sadly it will take another 5 to wide scale adoption and yet another 10 years for human driven cars to be banned to racetracks.
Your calculation implies that everyone replaces their car within a 5 year period.
That may be true in Beverly Hills, but it's certainly not true in the rest of the US.
The average age of cars on U.S. roads is 11.4 years, IHS Automotive reports. The average age of vehicles on U.S. roads has hit a plateau of about 11.4 years, according to an annual study by IHS Automotive, an auto industry research firm. Jun 9, 2014
In any case, I find your optimism unjustified.
In the Bay Area for instance, we could already make BART trains fully automated, and it's been studied they would become safer to boot, but attempting to change that system to get rid of the operators would be absolute political suicide.
The study is incomplete without examining intra-California career stifling.
Does it really matter in this case?
Non-competes in other states are enforced by the government, and therefore are much more widespread and effective than a criminal conspiracy of some of the big players.
I would agree. And I think the notion of teaching "Proper English" is less about saying common usage is wrong than it is with trying to slow down the fragmentation of the language into dialects.
If governments and institutions really wanted to slow down the fragmentation of the English language, then they would just standardize on American Los Angeles Hollywood English.
As it stands, most people are selfish and most people are the center of their own little worlds. They're perfectly willing to make their own dialect the new standard that everybody else has to abide to, especially to get jobs and government benefits, they're perfectly willing to make their language a marker of group identity and group pride, but they're unwilling to change their own language when it is found that another dialect is becoming the new standard.
A perfect manifestation of this kind selfishness is the British queen. Why can't she just learn proper Hollywood english like everybody else? She's just holding her own people back if she continues on this path.
I am as anti-spying as the next guy,but monitoring public postings to prevent cheating is not spying. If you re going to lie, cheat or steal, pass your notes in a private location.
The intent is not to prevent cheating. The intent is to only prevent the appearance of cheating. The intent is to prevent students from talking about the test after they've taken it and after they've gotten out of school already. Apparently, Pearson is cutting corners by selling the same test to all the schools no matter what time zone they're located in, or on what day the test is administered, which is the real problem here.
And so instead of revising its business model, it's spying on students and urging schools to penalize students when they're found to be talking about the test publicly online. Never mind, that they have no way to monitor private messages, or private emails, or other private communications, so their real intent here is to prevent the appearance of cheating, not the cheating itself -- which will continue underground because of the inherent flaw in their system.
I'm curious why you think an HBO exclusive deal to stream without a cable subscription on AppleTV is "lackluster". I wasn't ever going to get an AppleTV myself but that sealed it (along with the price drop).
Hopefully, your ISP isn't Comcast.
Comcast has blocked access to "HBO Go" on Amazon, Roku, and Sony Playstation. It's likely that they'll block "HBO Now" on Apple TV as well. That's actually one of the reasons HBO made this three-months exclusivity deal with Apple, because it's hoping that Comcast backs down against Apple.
If Comcast doesn't back down, I guess you'll be stuck watching Game of Thrones just like the rest of us through your TV screen via your computer, because Comcast doesn't block computers, it just blocks specialized TV devices.
This is a simple case of regulatory capture. The FAA is staffed by pilots, whose friends are pilots, and they regulate pilots. .
You're implying that pilots are all commercial pilots, when in fact many pilots are actually just private pilots. Private pilots are not even allowed to charge passengers for their own expenses as pilots. The most they can do is an even split of direct expenses (not indirect ones) making sure that they can never make any money on a particular plane-pooling or a plane-sharing arrangement
61.113(c): A private pilot may not pay less than the pro-rata share of a flight with passengers, provided the expenses involve only fuel, oil, airport expenditures, or rental fees.
simply posting the video to youtube does not in and of itself, generate income.
Yes, but he is a registered ad affiliate of Youtube. In other words, he has given his name, his mailing address, and his social security number in the hope of one day, having enough subscribers and viewers to receive an actual check through the mail.
From his own attorney:
Hanes told me that his videos are technically "monetized" on YouTube but that he has never received a payment from Google and the revenue he's technically earned from Google’s ads is less than a dollar.
Granted, the number of video views hasn't met the minimum threshold to be cut an actual check yet, but his intent is there. And the fact that he hasn't cancelled his affiliate status with Youtube yet, which would solve the entire problem in one swoop without needing to delete his existing channel, just means that he's hoping to generate enough page views through an artificially created controversy.
Placebo has no physiological effect (like homeopathy). Often people taking placebo, homeopathy, etc. will *report* feeling better - but this does not mean they are better in any meaningful sense of the word. It is very unethical to sell somebody a treatment which does not *treat* anything.
Assuming that research says one day that foot massages have the same effect as placebo, or have the same effect as just resting your feet, no more and no less, at least not anything that can be effectively measured objectively on the longterm health of people, I guess that you would consider therapeutic foot massage establishments unethical as well. Because obviously, the customer is not always right, the customer can't be trusted to evaluate his own feelings objectively, and that we should probably shut down all establishments that only make people feel better and do not *treat* anything else.
A penny a month per gigabyte... that's $10/month per terabyte... that is already what Dropbox charges for "fast" storage. So what gives? Why would I pay $10/month for a terabyte of slow storage when I can get the same amount of storage for the same price in a regular, fast format with Dropbox?
Dropbox offers no Service Level Agreement. Actually they specifically provide no warrantees whatsoever about their service (http://www.dropbox.com/terms). This is a non-starter for many CIOs.
Beyond that, the fact that Dropbox doesn't "own" the underlying cloud storage architecture -- Amazon S3 -- could be an issue, although they advertise it as secure via in-transit and on-disk encryption (https://www.dropbox.com/help/27).
If it still is the case that Dropbox uses S3 itself, then that wouldn't make business sense for them to pay more for storage than they're charging their own customers (even if they've decided not to offer a Service Level Agreement).
So my guess is that this has to do with the way they count the storage for customers. Assuming that their customers do not encrypt their data before they place it on DropBox (which would make sense because DropBox customers are rarely CIOs themselves), then DropBox is most likely hashing the content and only storing a single copy of a file even if there are thousand virtual instances of that same file throughout their system.
Also note that in the special case where a company is footing the bill and DropBox can't count the same file multiple times within that same company, otherwise the customer company would complain, then DropBox actually advertises a rate of $15 per 5 terabytes per month per user (with no Service Level Agreement of any kind even for business users).
Me, I think the Apple watch is interesting but it is ten times more expensive than it should be and is not waterproof, and these two facts mean I will never ever own one.
An Apple watch is really a bargain next to most Rolexes, and it does so much more than them. Hopefully, it will have a better anti-theft capability than a Rolex. Rolexes are nice, but sometimes thieves will chainsaw your arm right off in order to get the Rolex intact.
What makes things difficult, is that the people who are wrong don't know they're wrong.
No, that's not the difficult part. That's just a given.
The difficult part is trying to control something you have no control over.
Once you're willing to ignore that "destructive" blogger. And once you're willing to accept that you won't be able to change that person's mind, everything will be infinitely easier for you.
Low Earth orbit Musk believes he can launch and maintain a constellation of 4,000 satellites in low earth orbit and still make a profit while others are pursuing simpler and cheaper broadband solutions, which can be deployed more rapidly and with less environmental impact and no one sees a problem in this?
It wouldn't be the first time that the US government recruited an eccentric billionaire as a figure head and funded his private enterprise through back channels to maintain the illusion of corporate independence.
Take a look at Iridium or GlobalStar, the only two Low Earth Orbit satellite phone companies I know of. How come do they keep on finding new investors when they have such a poor track record at making money?
As a Canadian, you can visit the USA mostly without issue (working there is another matter).
Mostly if you're white, if there are no terrorist attacks, and if you don't have a drug record.
If you have dual citizenship, there is MORE scrutiny and more complication and more cost. It is never worth it, ever.
This is completely false.
Virtually everyone I know who has dual citizenship has officially (and expensively) renounced it, and none have any regrets, and all are still free to visit the USA.
There are three classes of people that you may know who have given up on their US citizenship. Vietnam-era draft dodgers, super rich people, and people who didn't know any better and who delayed too long to get their paperwork in order. Everyone else and everyone I personally know usually keeps their dual citizenship if they legally can.
There are good reasons to keep an American citizenship. For instance, American Universities are usually easier to get in than Canadian Universities (or most European Universities for that matter). American Universities are also far more flexible if your kid doesn't want to lock himself/herself in a particular major right away. And it may make things much easier to get resident status, get federal financial aid, and pay in-State tuition, if you already have a US citizenship (although the US citizenship itself is not the only criterion used for those decisions, so if your kid ever wants to study in the US, be super careful about that and do your research on the US educational system a couple of years in advance if you don't want to end up paying ten times more than everybody else).
The reason the clock is ticking is because if they wait until their 18th birthday, they will have to "technically" renounce their other citizenship if they want the American one. If they elect to become American citizens before their 18th birthday, then the US does not require them to make that choice.
In any case, there is almost no downside to become an American citizen for a European before his/her 18th birthday. The tax issue is really a non-issue for most Europeans. European taxes are far greater in Europe, and the US won't force someone to be double-taxed if the US citizen can prove their tax burden is equal or greater in the European country they're residing in (compared to the US). Perhaps, I could be wrong. Belgium is considered to be a tax haven after all, but I believe that this tax protection especially applies to super rich people, not to most Belgium citizens.
It's either bullshit(fairly likely) or the rules need to be changed yesterday(actually, at least a couple of administrations ago).
Chances are. Nobody had her personal email address either. Even if you can trust yourself not to retain incriminating emails, you can't really trust others who email you to do the same.
That's why you funnel everything through your aide and you use your aide email address, even if you're the micromanaging type and respond to some of the emails yourself (but even if you do respond yourself, you still sign it with the name of your aide). This way, if something goes wrong, or if plausible deniability is needed, you can always blame the aide. Always use a go-between. This is like Mafia101.
... a secure notepad which syncs between devices. Because you can't rely on Google or Microsoft when it comes to your data's security. But two different business consultants persuaded me to write 8th instead (which I was going to do in any event, to get to the secure notepad).
Now I'm seriously weighing whether or not to take up the secure notepad project again
There are already secure notepads on Google Play. That being said, my own impression of those apps could be flawed, so you should test if those two business consultants are serious. Ask them what other similar apps they've tried. Ask them how much they're willing to contribute to your project if you start a Kickstarter on it.
Talk is cheap. Ideas are cheap (especially if it makes them sound important). Just ask them to put money where their mouths are.
The real issue is the extra battery drain it creates and the extra delay it takes to read/write encrypted data. In other words, this is an acceptable tradeoff for an employer and this is an acceptable tradeoff for some people who really care about security, but it's really not acceptable for most consumers.
If it ever becomes the default on consumer phones, for liability reasons or for whatever, the first thing people will learn is how to disable it so they can save battery power.
Considering the amount of successful projects kickstarter has, I think they should offer an insurance for x% of the price of good (optional), where you get a full refund if the item is not delivered within 3 - 6 months. They'd probably even end up making money of the insurance, and for some things (like a $700 bike I was considering) it would help a lot.
You've got a winner there! You should start a kickstarter about it.
I'm sure people will be happy to spend an extra $650 so they can recover their original $700
"When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk." Ref: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ar...
With access to free showers, free laundry service, and free extra yummy food outside of regular working hours. I could also see myself never leaving my workplace and sleeping 130 hours a week.
Slashdot Mirror
My prophecy:
Self driving cars will be better than humans in 99,99% of the situations within 3 years. Sadly it will take another 5 to wide scale adoption and yet another 10 years for human driven cars to be banned to racetracks.
Your calculation implies that everyone replaces their car within a 5 year period.
That may be true in Beverly Hills, but it's certainly not true in the rest of the US.
The average age of cars on U.S. roads is 11.4 years, IHS Automotive reports. The average age of vehicles on U.S. roads has hit a plateau of about 11.4 years, according to an annual study by IHS Automotive, an auto industry research firm. Jun 9, 2014
In any case, I find your optimism unjustified.
In the Bay Area for instance, we could already make BART trains fully automated, and it's been studied they would become safer to boot, but attempting to change that system to get rid of the operators would be absolute political suicide.
The study is incomplete without examining intra-California career stifling.
Does it really matter in this case?
Non-competes in other states are enforced by the government, and therefore are much more widespread and effective than a criminal conspiracy of some of the big players.
(p.s. it's not free, you pay with your personal information and privacy)
Youtube doesn't have ads when you watch Khan videos.
I suppose Youtube could still track you, but the same could be said of any video you watch on the internet.
I would agree. And I think the notion of teaching "Proper English" is less about saying common usage is wrong than it is with trying to slow down the fragmentation of the language into dialects.
If governments and institutions really wanted to slow down the fragmentation of the English language, then they would just standardize on American Los Angeles Hollywood English.
As it stands, most people are selfish and most people are the center of their own little worlds. They're perfectly willing to make their own dialect the new standard that everybody else has to abide to, especially to get jobs and government benefits, they're perfectly willing to make their language a marker of group identity and group pride, but they're unwilling to change their own language when it is found that another dialect is becoming the new standard.
A perfect manifestation of this kind selfishness is the British queen. Why can't she just learn proper Hollywood english like everybody else? She's just holding her own people back if she continues on this path.
I am as anti-spying as the next guy,but monitoring public postings to prevent cheating is not spying. If you re going to lie, cheat or steal, pass your notes in a private location.
The intent is not to prevent cheating. The intent is to only prevent the appearance of cheating. The intent is to prevent students from talking about the test after they've taken it and after they've gotten out of school already. Apparently, Pearson is cutting corners by selling the same test to all the schools no matter what time zone they're located in, or on what day the test is administered, which is the real problem here.
And so instead of revising its business model, it's spying on students and urging schools to penalize students when they're found to be talking about the test publicly online. Never mind, that they have no way to monitor private messages, or private emails, or other private communications, so their real intent here is to prevent the appearance of cheating, not the cheating itself -- which will continue underground because of the inherent flaw in their system.
It's gotten lackluster support across the board.
I'm curious why you think an HBO exclusive deal to stream without a cable subscription on AppleTV is "lackluster". I wasn't ever going to get an AppleTV myself but that sealed it (along with the price drop).
Hopefully, your ISP isn't Comcast.
Comcast has blocked access to "HBO Go" on Amazon, Roku, and Sony Playstation. It's likely that they'll block "HBO Now" on Apple TV as well. That's actually one of the reasons HBO made this three-months exclusivity deal with Apple, because it's hoping that Comcast backs down against Apple.
If Comcast doesn't back down, I guess you'll be stuck watching Game of Thrones just like the rest of us through your TV screen via your computer, because Comcast doesn't block computers, it just blocks specialized TV devices.
This is a simple case of regulatory capture. The FAA is staffed by pilots, whose friends are pilots, and they regulate pilots. .
You're implying that pilots are all commercial pilots, when in fact many pilots are actually just private pilots. Private pilots are not even allowed to charge passengers for their own expenses as pilots. The most they can do is an even split of direct expenses (not indirect ones) making sure that they can never make any money on a particular plane-pooling or a plane-sharing arrangement
61.113(c): A private pilot may not pay less than the pro-rata share of a flight with passengers, provided the expenses involve only fuel, oil, airport expenditures, or rental fees.
simply posting the video to youtube does not in and of itself, generate income.
Yes, but he is a registered ad affiliate of Youtube. In other words, he has given his name, his mailing address, and his social security number in the hope of one day, having enough subscribers and viewers to receive an actual check through the mail.
From his own attorney:
Hanes told me that his videos are technically "monetized" on YouTube but that he has never received a payment from Google and the revenue he's technically earned from Google’s ads is less than a dollar.
Granted, the number of video views hasn't met the minimum threshold to be cut an actual check yet, but his intent is there. And the fact that he hasn't cancelled his affiliate status with Youtube yet, which would solve the entire problem in one swoop without needing to delete his existing channel, just means that he's hoping to generate enough page views through an artificially created controversy.
If the US had grabbed him, tried him in some kangaroo court and imprisoned him, he'd stay relevant as a sort of journalistic martyr.
Yes, Chelsea/Bradley Manning is having a great time of it.
It's really cool to be a journalistic martyr and have all the accolades. I'm told the suicide watch time period of his life was his/her favorite part.
Either way Wikileaks has been killed without its killers having done anything that looks like a heavy-handed suppression of journalism.
And yet, leaks still happen.
Stopping wikileaks was about as successful as plugging a failed river damn with half a square of toilet paper.
The US may have gotten its childish revenge, but this kind of treatment only pushed a future whistleblower like Snowden to work for our enemies.
Placebo has no physiological effect (like homeopathy). Often people taking placebo, homeopathy, etc. will *report* feeling better - but this does not mean they are better in any meaningful sense of the word. It is very unethical to sell somebody a treatment which does not *treat* anything.
Assuming that research says one day that foot massages have the same effect as placebo, or have the same effect as just resting your feet, no more and no less, at least not anything that can be effectively measured objectively on the longterm health of people, I guess that you would consider therapeutic foot massage establishments unethical as well. Because obviously, the customer is not always right, the customer can't be trusted to evaluate his own feelings objectively, and that we should probably shut down all establishments that only make people feel better and do not *treat* anything else.
A penny a month per gigabyte... that's $10/month per terabyte... that is already what Dropbox charges for "fast" storage. So what gives? Why would I pay $10/month for a terabyte of slow storage when I can get the same amount of storage for the same price in a regular, fast format with Dropbox?
Here is an answer from someone on Quora.
Dropbox offers no Service Level Agreement. Actually they specifically provide no warrantees whatsoever about their service (http://www.dropbox.com/terms). This is a non-starter for many CIOs.
Beyond that, the fact that Dropbox doesn't "own" the underlying cloud storage architecture -- Amazon S3 -- could be an issue, although they advertise it as secure via in-transit and on-disk encryption (https://www.dropbox.com/help/27).
If it still is the case that Dropbox uses S3 itself, then that wouldn't make business sense for them to pay more for storage than they're charging their own customers (even if they've decided not to offer a Service Level Agreement).
So my guess is that this has to do with the way they count the storage for customers. Assuming that their customers do not encrypt their data before they place it on DropBox (which would make sense because DropBox customers are rarely CIOs themselves), then DropBox is most likely hashing the content and only storing a single copy of a file even if there are thousand virtual instances of that same file throughout their system.
Also note that in the special case where a company is footing the bill and DropBox can't count the same file multiple times within that same company, otherwise the customer company would complain, then DropBox actually advertises a rate of $15 per 5 terabytes per month per user (with no Service Level Agreement of any kind even for business users).
...the fact he has no Senate cosponsor is not because if it's not introduced in the Senate it can't become law.
Can someone explain this quadruple negative? I'm not sure I understand it.
Me, I think the Apple watch is interesting but it is ten times more expensive than it should be
and is not waterproof, and these two facts mean I will never ever own one.
An Apple watch is really a bargain next to most Rolexes, and it does so much more than them. Hopefully, it will have a better anti-theft capability than a Rolex. Rolexes are nice, but sometimes thieves will chainsaw your arm right off in order to get the Rolex intact.
What makes things difficult, is that the people who are wrong don't know they're wrong.
No, that's not the difficult part. That's just a given.
The difficult part is trying to control something you have no control over.
Once you're willing to ignore that "destructive" blogger. And once you're willing to accept that you won't be able to change that person's mind, everything will be infinitely easier for you.
Technically, T-Mobile and AT&T already support it, so you must be talking about the CDMA carriers.
Low Earth orbit Musk believes he can launch and maintain a constellation of 4,000 satellites in low earth orbit and still make a profit while others are pursuing simpler and cheaper broadband solutions, which can be deployed more rapidly and with less environmental impact and no one sees a problem in this?
It wouldn't be the first time that the US government recruited an eccentric billionaire as a figure head and funded his private enterprise through back channels to maintain the illusion of corporate independence.
Take a look at Iridium or GlobalStar, the only two Low Earth Orbit satellite phone companies I know of. How come do they keep on finding new investors when they have such a poor track record at making money?
Based on how crappy this looks, I would guess either Chinese or Russian.
Wow! You must be a master detective! I would have guessed Spanish or Italian based on the language printed on the device.
"Marron" could be French, but "Blanco" is definitely not French.
Coins are stupid.
Most likely, a ruler is not the first thing you put in your bag when you go to a Hackathon/conference.
The Euro in the pictures has a diameter of 23.25 mm. It almost has the same diameter as an American quarter which is 24.26 mm (0.955 inches).
As a Canadian, you can visit the USA mostly without issue (working there is another matter).
Mostly if you're white, if there are no terrorist attacks, and if you don't have a drug record.
If you have dual citizenship, there is MORE scrutiny and more complication and more cost. It is never worth it, ever.
This is completely false.
Virtually everyone I know who has dual citizenship has officially (and expensively) renounced it, and none have any regrets, and all are still free to visit the USA.
There are three classes of people that you may know who have given up on their US citizenship. Vietnam-era draft dodgers, super rich people, and people who didn't know any better and who delayed too long to get their paperwork in order. Everyone else and everyone I personally know usually keeps their dual citizenship if they legally can.
There are good reasons to keep an American citizenship. For instance, American Universities are usually easier to get in than Canadian Universities (or most European Universities for that matter). American Universities are also far more flexible if your kid doesn't want to lock himself/herself in a particular major right away. And it may make things much easier to get resident status, get federal financial aid, and pay in-State tuition, if you already have a US citizenship (although the US citizenship itself is not the only criterion used for those decisions, so if your kid ever wants to study in the US, be super careful about that and do your research on the US educational system a couple of years in advance if you don't want to end up paying ten times more than everybody else).
Why is 'the clock ticking'?
The reason the clock is ticking is because if they wait until their 18th birthday, they will have to "technically" renounce their other citizenship if they want the American one. If they elect to become American citizens before their 18th birthday, then the US does not require them to make that choice.
In any case, there is almost no downside to become an American citizen for a European before his/her 18th birthday. The tax issue is really a non-issue for most Europeans. European taxes are far greater in Europe, and the US won't force someone to be double-taxed if the US citizen can prove their tax burden is equal or greater in the European country they're residing in (compared to the US). Perhaps, I could be wrong. Belgium is considered to be a tax haven after all, but I believe that this tax protection especially applies to super rich people, not to most Belgium citizens.
It's either bullshit(fairly likely) or the rules need to be changed yesterday(actually, at least a couple of administrations ago).
Chances are. Nobody had her personal email address either. Even if you can trust yourself not to retain incriminating emails, you can't really trust others who email you to do the same.
That's why you funnel everything through your aide and you use your aide email address, even if you're the micromanaging type and respond to some of the emails yourself (but even if you do respond yourself, you still sign it with the name of your aide). This way, if something goes wrong, or if plausible deniability is needed, you can always blame the aide. Always use a go-between. This is like Mafia101.
... a secure notepad which syncs between devices. Because you can't rely on Google or Microsoft when it comes to your data's security. But two different business consultants persuaded me to write 8th instead (which I was going to do in any event, to get to the secure notepad).
Now I'm seriously weighing whether or not to take up the secure notepad project again
There are already secure notepads on Google Play. That being said, my own impression of those apps could be flawed, so you should test if those two business consultants are serious. Ask them what other similar apps they've tried. Ask them how much they're willing to contribute to your project if you start a Kickstarter on it.
Talk is cheap. Ideas are cheap (especially if it makes them sound important). Just ask them to put money where their mouths are.
The real issue is the extra battery drain it creates and the extra delay it takes to read/write encrypted data. In other words, this is an acceptable tradeoff for an employer and this is an acceptable tradeoff for some people who really care about security, but it's really not acceptable for most consumers.
If it ever becomes the default on consumer phones, for liability reasons or for whatever, the first thing people will learn is how to disable it so they can save battery power.
Considering the amount of successful projects kickstarter has, I think they should offer an insurance for x% of the price of good (optional), where you get a full refund if the item is not delivered within 3 - 6 months. They'd probably even end up making money of the insurance, and for some things (like a $700 bike I was considering) it would help a lot.
You've got a winner there! You should start a kickstarter about it.
I'm sure people will be happy to spend an extra $650 so they can recover their original $700
"When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk." Ref: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ar...
With access to free showers, free laundry service, and free extra yummy food outside of regular working hours. I could also see myself never leaving my workplace and sleeping 130 hours a week.