1 site in every 878 not working with a browser doesn't seem like much. Have things actually gotten that stable?
I don't think slashdot has been up 1/100th of the last year. Wasn't there an outage of several days less than a year ago?
Even Amazon has had significant outages this year. Netflix was down some. No site seems above having an outage. And even if they are, there are still many times a year that my own internet goes out - certainly more often than my electricity goes out.
The internet is not a stable, always up environment and likely never will be. Electricity distribution is over a century old and not yet stable. Water distribution is older than that and still goes out.
Why do people insist on making a big deal out of an outage for a tiny few irresponsible sites?
The first to be written up in Popular Science and other publications was over 100 years ago - the Curtiss Autoplane. Like many in the past 20 years, it succeeded in getting off the ground for short hops, but little more. There were efforts that truly flew at least as early as the 40s. As you indicate, flying hasn't really been the problem.
I think this feature had been going for a couple of days before I noticed it. I guess I'm used to editors doing similar things. But, the implementation also seems to be remarkably non-obtrusive. Nothing seems to have slowed or changed other than I can occasionally tab through a suggestion if I happen to notice it in time. I'll be leaving it on and gradually start using it.
What I find most surprising is that any of the suggestions are actually exactly what I intended to type. A lot of them are.
Of course, we will likely see the required article about some shocking suggestion within days now. I'm surprised it isn't already out there. Someone will sit and spend a few hours working to trigger something so that they can feed someone's agenda with a new viral campaign.
I did note that when typing an email discussing the reason for purchasing a new pair of running shorts that it guessed that I had gained weight and completed a sentence about that appropriately. Some might find that offensive:-)
I'm good at it. I would gladly make it a business, but those who want help for some reason think that the time they themselves put into it was free and mine should be too.
They see it like writing an email. Few consider the cost of all of the emails they have written in terms of their time. It is viewed more like the time to walk to the bathroom - just a necessary part of living.
Interestingly, I've noted that the same ones that need the most help on their spreadsheets also need the most help on their emails / memos. They could be redlined with a paintbrush.
There are some. Solar causes localized cooling and massive farms could actually become a weather problem, especially if efficiency keeps going up. But, all of that heat energy just gets moved with the electricity produced.
But, as a kid, I loved water skiing near the nuclear plant at Lake Keowee during cooler weather because the water was about 10 degrees warmer. That is what nuclear plants do - create heat. The portion that does not become electricity due to inefficiencies goes into the local environment.
Any source that uses heat to drive turbines is going to heat the local environment. They just aren't very efficient at the conversion.
But, as this article points out, any source that drives a turbine at all will generate heat. So, even hydro is going to lose some of its energy to heating the water and the things the water flows over.
But, I'd be surprised if the net effect to the local environment versus letting the water free flow through the same fall is not a cooling one because a lot of the potential energy is converted to electricity that would have otherwise been converted to heat in the natural course of the water's movement.
Given the current environment, there is a very good strategic reason to do this now other than the publicity advantages.
We are at or very close to full employment. Many retail businesses near me are already having much greater difficulty finding employees and turnover is climbing. The holiday season is approaching. There will be a severe crunch this holiday season to staff seasonal employees.
Amazon has just made a very aggressive grab for those seasonal employees. Other retail businesses already in deep trouble will likely not be able to match this new pay scale. If the crunch is as deep as expected, some employers will likely not be able to find necessary staff. This could represent the final straw for weaker competitors.
I was talking to an Amazon employee today who said it appears that they are definitely performing a compression of lower range employee salaries to implement this minimum - as I would expect.
What this means is that their lowest paid workers will be raised to $15 / hour. Others paid more than that will likely be raised to higher than that. So, for example, someone making $10 / hour might go to $15 and someone making $13 / hour might go to $17.
The employee had no idea how high the salary compression would go, but presumably, there is a stopping point. Perhaps someone at $25 / hour will still get $25 / hour and everyone under some ceiling of the compression range will get something depending on how close they are to that ceiling.
This makes sense because positions that make more should still make more, and it avoids throwing away rewards given for performance and experience.
The employee I spoke to was making closer to $20 / hour and is expecting that this will result in a raise.
Could it work if the data was stored encrypted? That IS the only way data can be secured, right?
Yes, but the encryption standard, means of exchanging keys, etc. must be standardized so that the third party apps you've given permission to access your data can be handed revocable keys and know how to utilize those keys.
In general, for this scheme to work, a lot of standardization of data representations and access methods must be present. Data created for one app needs to be usable by others. That isn't possible if both apps don't understand the data in the same way. The success of the pods thus depends a whole lot on the use of RDF technologies, i.e. semantic data. True security of the data requires it to be encrypted using keys under full control of the user at all times except when being processed by an app and all of those apps will have to know how to obtain and utilize those keys.
Just read much of the inrupt.com site and some of the specifications on github. Not everything, but alot. Two critical problems seem obvious though it is possible I missed the provisions.
First, I see no indication that access to the pods is end-to-end encrypted. So, if your pod is stored on a server that is not your own, they definitely have access to your data. No 3rd party server can be trusted with your data (even if it can, you won't get notified when that changes) and few have the skills to stand up their own server. I would think that a requirement for end-to-end encryption of all data is an obvious one. An app given permission to access it must also be given some type of revocable keys.
Second, I don't see provisions to stop apps from taking the data and writing it somewhere else. To control your data, you must control the writing at everywhere it is processed as well. Apps should be forced to run in a sandbox that can only write data to approved places and all memory in the sandbox should be reliably wiped when the app is no longer needed. Trust of the sandbox should be verified before pods can be accessed.
Without at least these provisions, I see no possibility that this system can deliver user's control of the dissemination of their data.
If this is like 1989 www in development maturity, we should start seeing stuff interesting to the common folk in about 5 years. But, I was enjoying the internet before 1989. This level of development brings back good memories.
What about all of our fighters? Most can be slaved to other fighters, like F22s, right now and the new ones have no fully mechanical controls. They have extensive communications so that they can fight as automated teams, utilize each other's sensor suites, etc. If a hacker could get in, they could theoretically have a squadron at their control with pilots along as helpless hostages. I guess the pilots could destroy the flyability by punching out. It would be a very expensive loss if a whole squadron punched.
Or what about our guided missile frigates. Again, tons of communication channels and computer control. If the network could be penetrated, a hacker could wipe out a fleet with the ordinance a single frigate carries.
In many cases with current systems, the people are only in control because the software has been written to put them in the loop, and there are often modes of operation available but not used where they are only in the loop for the initial command. We even have systems where the people who are in the loop are at some location thousands of miles away. People in Washington can push the button to drop a bomb from a drone halfway around the world.
The point is, we already have highly automated, massively destructive systems that could be turned against us if the networks and systems could be hacked. This is nothing new. I worked on manned systems in the 90s that had enough automation and remote coordination that network security was a serious concern. We have been doing this for a long time.
Moreover, secure communications is something that has been critical to military operations forever. The first line of security is not the drivers and OS on a device, it is the network itself. Just disrupting the communications of advanced military devices is hard enough. Actually injecting your own traffic into these channels is way past the skill necessary to break into virtually anything else out there.
And once you're in, you're not usually going to find Linux or anything else you know. I worked on a mission computer operating system. It was 100% custom. There wasn't a single line of commercial code in that system. A hacker would find nothing familiar.
There is no new risk here. Virtually every modern weapon system is robotic and many are mostly autonomous with heavy usage of data channels for control. If hackers could take them over, we'd have long ago suffered these imagined catastrophes.
If $25 billion comes off of Tesla stock, Musk loses $5 billion. Investors, many of whom are bottom 90% folks investing 401K money, lose $20 billion. So, the vast majority of the punishment goes right by Musk. This is like dropping a bomb that causes 4 times as much collateral as strategic damage. Our government tries not to do things like this these days.
A fine would be more straightforward and hurt others less though I think even a smallish $2 billion or so fine would be devastating to Musk. He doesn't have over $20 billion. He has that much funny money/stock.
Trying to turn $2 billion of that into real money could be difficult. I don't think he has that much unleveraged stock that can be sold. In order to not lose control, he has taken out loans in lieu of selling stock. Those loans are backed by several times as much stock as the loans because the bankers have to feel guaranteed they will get their money even if the stock plummets. And nobody would loan him that much more without having $10 billion or so in unleveraged stock to back the $2 billion loan. He'd have to sell enough stock to pay off some of his loans which are backed by his stock. That would then free up the stock to sell. In the meantime, the stock would be dropping because he'd be endangering his control of the company's direction. So a $2 billion fine could end up costing him a multiple of that in net worth.
Certainly. But the SEC has a history of being practical more often than not. Whether Musk initiated the harm or not, they have the choice of limiting the harm or not. They do not serve the majority of the stockholders in not exercising those choices wisely.
Just as suicide by cop does not serve justice and most cops try to avoid participating in it if they can, the SEC will likely try to avoid being the instrument of a much greater destruction (at least 10-fold the losses in my estimates) than has already occurred.
I'm honestly not sure how to play those delivery numbers now. I was fixing to jump in for the expected 10% plus jump (trader here, no long investments with a recession in the wind). But, I'm in the camp that believes that Tesla without Musk at the helm will be just another car company instead of a company headed for a full vertical stack business in Transportation as a Service that is the only thing that can justify it being amongst the highest valued companies. To be valued in the $50+ billion range at this point in its life can only be justified by an expectation of a value that is a multiple of the top car company in the world in the decade out time frame because values don't stay flat while the company grows to its target.
Without his dynamism, they may not fail, but they will only succeed in having sparked the transition to electric, not in the more far-reaching task of rewriting the automotive business model which likely has another 15 years to critical mass. He also badly needs a Tesla worth several times more than today to gain the finances he'll need for Mars at about that same 15 year time frame. He needs a Tesla providing a few hundred billion miles a year of TaaS.
The SEC has to be very careful here because in punishing Musk for a 10% increase that hurt a few minority shorts, they could spark a 50%+ decrease that would be of far greater total monetary harm to the majority longs.
Many of the older, calmer investment experts I've read comment on this battle from the POV of experience say that the SEC will talk big but balance what they do to Musk with concern for their own potential of causing more damage than the momentary glitch Musk caused. 10% increases and decreases in Tesla are an expected norm. I personally consider the stock to be unchanged from a long-term POV as long as it stays between about 250 and 370. It is that volatile.
Good point. Though, perhaps the next level of evolution is to both make some noise and automatically turn on the indicator. It wouldn't be the required distance before the lane departure, but it would be something. You'd have to make sure there is no way to just have automatic indicators without an annoying warning noise though, otherwise you'd have the unintended consequence of everyone just thinking they don't need to manage their own indicators anymore.
I doubt that I'd find blind spot warnings to be of much extra help either. The few situations that might help are probably amongst those that it can't handle such as when people gun it out of a line of traffic behind you into a gap beside you right as you're trying to switch into the same faster lane or when someone comes into the blindspot from a direction that is out of the field of view of the mirror.
But, I'm human, and there are times that I have to drive when I am very upset or angry and adrenaline has a way of trashing the normal careful habits because it trashes thought. Having an audible tone during rare times of distraction could save me from a mistake, though car manufacturers have to cater to all and should have both audible and visual on anything critical.
Also, when thinking of these things as good drivers, I think we must keep in mind the small percentage of people who are actually good drivers most of the time. We cannot always defend ourselves from the mistakes of others. So we should also think of what we'd like the others to have in their vehicles.
Some of these numbers seem about like what I've observed of drivers who probably don't have these technologies. Within the past week I've had at least 4 drivers I can remember, including a bus driver and a truck driver, switch lanes while I was beside them. I doubt I drove more than about 80 miles total during that time - all in city traffic. I don't think the vehicles I remember were new enough to have blind spot monitoring or that I was really in a blind spot. Also, I drive about the same speed as the other traffic, so I was not approaching fast or anything that could have caused the issue. None of them looked.
Also, I've seen people going down the interstate reading newspapers, reading books, shaving, etc. most of my life. They were likely using plain old-fashioned non-adaptive cruise control. I don't know that 29% feeling comfortable doing other things while using their adaptive cruise control is a significant increase over regular cruise control without seeing the control group data.
AAA is all about changing people's behaviors. Even if these technologies show no increase in problems, they would still publish this story because they see a potential for improvement if people change. And they would always leave out the control group because they want to shock people.
In general, if a technology requires driver education to be effective, forget it in this country. The only question that matters is whether the statistics indicate there is a reduction in accidents with the technology. If there is, use the technology. The fact that some get killed who might not have without it is irrelevant. Only the average matters when looking for societal progress.
As VR really comes into play or rather when it gets to the point, I would find virtual tourism much more interesting than most current games.
But, I also hope that they eventually develop the capability to generate virtual worlds to explore in the way old sci fi books did,,, i.e. for the purpose of exploring "what if" scenarios. Hopefully this age where good games have to be painstakingly developed by artists will be short-lived.
I never played Myst. But, recently, I attempted to find a game I'd like to play and couldn't. Much about Myst sounds like what I'd like in a game.
I have no desire to play any standard shoot em ups, especially against other people online. I did enjoy Splinter Cell years ago, though I find it very annoying to have such a set script or even a game that has an ending. A much more open world version of that would be far better.
What I believe I'd enjoy the most would be hiking or survival games based on real world locations with no scripting, extreme detail, operating mostly in real world time without acceleration (at least while the character is awake), and a lot of very realistic interaction with nature. The occasional need to avoid a bear or find food, water, or shelter is an OK introduction of violence as thoughtful planning is relaxing too. I'd just like the game to be beautiful, relaxing, complex, and unbounded.
I couldn't find anything that seemed to come close to catering to my needs. If I missed something, I'd love to hear suggestions.
I found it very boring that virtually every popular first person game was exactly the opposite of relaxing. The high-end gaming universe seems to have no variety at all and is almost all some version of shoot or otherwise damage the monster (human or not).
I had similar thoughts from a different angle. The headline represents a twisted view.
Would we rather they just continue to remove massive piles of cash from the economy? Even as an investor, I'd much rather see money being invested in research, development, and production growth than to have it sit doing nothing.
The fact that the cash reserves are still growing reflects a crisis of innovation in my mind. Please, innovate, grow, take risks. Don't just remove money from the economy and sit on it.
In my experience, I've always had to clean out old papers and trash when moving a business or business group into a "new" office. Much of that was just moving a group around within the facilities of a large corporation (one of the Dow 30), but, you'd think that would be better because the folks that moved out weren't losing their jobs.
I've actually encountered the same thing with houses. I've done some flipping, and it is remarkable how many people leave almost everything.
One home I rebuilt had been the home of a family with at least two young children. All of the clothes were still there, toys left where they had last been played with, kitchen fully stocked, dishes in the sink, bills in the drawers, all of the normal bathroom stuff in the bathroom, family pictures on the walls and in photo albums, and on and on. In my imagination, I figured they had been in a wreck or something where everyone died. I checked just to satisfy my curiosity and found that they had decided to move to Europe and just abandoned everything they couldn't take with them on the plane.
It is pretty much useless to the 85ish% that are in the Android ecosystem.
I use a Fitbit. It could be improved. It is annoying that it has to be charged every 5 days because that produces gaps in the data. It would also be nice if it had a bigger display. It can be difficult to read the heart rate at a glance with sweat in your eyes while you're running.
Mine doesn't have GPS or LTE but that is fine. Why would I want to pay twice for those features? I often talk on the phone while running (via bluetooth earbuds) so the phone is going with me no matter what.
The FCC has no right to mass appropriate property for the telecom companies. They seem to be trying it without even going through an eminent domain process. Since when did all local government owned property become the federal government's? Perhaps the feds would like to pay for all of its maintenance too.
A lot of the communities around me have sparse 3G/4G coverage because tall structures aren't allowed. These things are a community's right to determine. If the local citizens feel that the appearance of their community is more important than cellular access, so be it.
The degree to which the feds are pushing 5G seems off. It must have a massive backdoor or something.
Perhaps they are aiming to claim they have massively increased broadband availability for rural locations or something. If so, they need to change the definitions. The caps on cellular data price it well out of reach cost-wise for average Americans and it often doesn't allow tethering to support a home internet. I'm doing good to afford the $50/month for my cable internet. Thankfully, having that supply the WiFi at home keeps the cellular data used by our phones under 2GB per month so basic plans are good.
A definition like "broadband is defined as a 24/7 internet connection that delivers at least 25MB with no data caps no more than $50 per month and can provide for the full IoT environment in the home (connections that ban tethering wouldn't count)" would be good for judging whether an individual has coverage that allows them to have a basic home internet experience at a cost that most could handle.
In a free environment, a certain amount of risk must be allowed to exist. Otherwise, a back door to limiting freedoms opens up. If the requirements for enforcement become too costly, then the result will be the same as banning add-ins in the first place. If those costs are pushed to the add-in developers in some way, it furthermore results in unevenly banning add-ins because only larger-scale businesses could afford to attempt to enter the market. Regulations almost always favor large businesses by increasing cost-of-entry.
All that said, there are some ways that I can see things being made more secure. Google could force all add-ins to publish their code for review by any consumer. Or they could force the add-ins to run in sandboxes that can see and process the data but not send any data or derivative of the data outside of the client sandbox or a sandbox running on a Google-controlled and monitored server. But even if they did something like that, I'd want the ability as a consumer to give the business the right to collect my data if I so choose. There are applications I can imagine that might use my email data in combination with data collected elsewhere to provide or improve services not directly related to my email.
Slashdot Mirror
1 site in every 878 not working with a browser doesn't seem like much. Have things actually gotten that stable?
I don't think slashdot has been up 1/100th of the last year. Wasn't there an outage of several days less than a year ago?
Even Amazon has had significant outages this year. Netflix was down some. No site seems above having an outage. And even if they are, there are still many times a year that my own internet goes out - certainly more often than my electricity goes out.
The internet is not a stable, always up environment and likely never will be. Electricity distribution is over a century old and not yet stable. Water distribution is older than that and still goes out.
Why do people insist on making a big deal out of an outage for a tiny few irresponsible sites?
The first to be written up in Popular Science and other publications was over 100 years ago - the Curtiss Autoplane. Like many in the past 20 years, it succeeded in getting off the ground for short hops, but little more. There were efforts that truly flew at least as early as the 40s. As you indicate, flying hasn't really been the problem.
I think this feature had been going for a couple of days before I noticed it. I guess I'm used to editors doing similar things. But, the implementation also seems to be remarkably non-obtrusive. Nothing seems to have slowed or changed other than I can occasionally tab through a suggestion if I happen to notice it in time. I'll be leaving it on and gradually start using it.
What I find most surprising is that any of the suggestions are actually exactly what I intended to type. A lot of them are.
Of course, we will likely see the required article about some shocking suggestion within days now. I'm surprised it isn't already out there. Someone will sit and spend a few hours working to trigger something so that they can feed someone's agenda with a new viral campaign.
I did note that when typing an email discussing the reason for purchasing a new pair of running shorts that it guessed that I had gained weight and completed a sentence about that appropriately. Some might find that offensive :-)
I'm good at it. I would gladly make it a business, but those who want help for some reason think that the time they themselves put into it was free and mine should be too.
They see it like writing an email. Few consider the cost of all of the emails they have written in terms of their time. It is viewed more like the time to walk to the bathroom - just a necessary part of living.
Interestingly, I've noted that the same ones that need the most help on their spreadsheets also need the most help on their emails / memos. They could be redlined with a paintbrush.
There are some. Solar causes localized cooling and massive farms could actually become a weather problem, especially if efficiency keeps going up. But, all of that heat energy just gets moved with the electricity produced.
But, as a kid, I loved water skiing near the nuclear plant at Lake Keowee during cooler weather because the water was about 10 degrees warmer. That is what nuclear plants do - create heat. The portion that does not become electricity due to inefficiencies goes into the local environment.
Any source that uses heat to drive turbines is going to heat the local environment. They just aren't very efficient at the conversion.
But, as this article points out, any source that drives a turbine at all will generate heat. So, even hydro is going to lose some of its energy to heating the water and the things the water flows over.
But, I'd be surprised if the net effect to the local environment versus letting the water free flow through the same fall is not a cooling one because a lot of the potential energy is converted to electricity that would have otherwise been converted to heat in the natural course of the water's movement.
Given the current environment, there is a very good strategic reason to do this now other than the publicity advantages.
We are at or very close to full employment. Many retail businesses near me are already having much greater difficulty finding employees and turnover is climbing. The holiday season is approaching. There will be a severe crunch this holiday season to staff seasonal employees.
Amazon has just made a very aggressive grab for those seasonal employees. Other retail businesses already in deep trouble will likely not be able to match this new pay scale. If the crunch is as deep as expected, some employers will likely not be able to find necessary staff. This could represent the final straw for weaker competitors.
I was talking to an Amazon employee today who said it appears that they are definitely performing a compression of lower range employee salaries to implement this minimum - as I would expect.
What this means is that their lowest paid workers will be raised to $15 / hour. Others paid more than that will likely be raised to higher than that. So, for example, someone making $10 / hour might go to $15 and someone making $13 / hour might go to $17.
The employee had no idea how high the salary compression would go, but presumably, there is a stopping point. Perhaps someone at $25 / hour will still get $25 / hour and everyone under some ceiling of the compression range will get something depending on how close they are to that ceiling.
This makes sense because positions that make more should still make more, and it avoids throwing away rewards given for performance and experience.
The employee I spoke to was making closer to $20 / hour and is expecting that this will result in a raise.
Could it work if the data was stored encrypted? That IS the only way data can be secured, right?
Yes, but the encryption standard, means of exchanging keys, etc. must be standardized so that the third party apps you've given permission to access your data can be handed revocable keys and know how to utilize those keys.
In general, for this scheme to work, a lot of standardization of data representations and access methods must be present. Data created for one app needs to be usable by others. That isn't possible if both apps don't understand the data in the same way. The success of the pods thus depends a whole lot on the use of RDF technologies, i.e. semantic data. True security of the data requires it to be encrypted using keys under full control of the user at all times except when being processed by an app and all of those apps will have to know how to obtain and utilize those keys.
Just read much of the inrupt.com site and some of the specifications on github. Not everything, but alot. Two critical problems seem obvious though it is possible I missed the provisions.
First, I see no indication that access to the pods is end-to-end encrypted. So, if your pod is stored on a server that is not your own, they definitely have access to your data. No 3rd party server can be trusted with your data (even if it can, you won't get notified when that changes) and few have the skills to stand up their own server. I would think that a requirement for end-to-end encryption of all data is an obvious one. An app given permission to access it must also be given some type of revocable keys.
Second, I don't see provisions to stop apps from taking the data and writing it somewhere else. To control your data, you must control the writing at everywhere it is processed as well. Apps should be forced to run in a sandbox that can only write data to approved places and all memory in the sandbox should be reliably wiped when the app is no longer needed. Trust of the sandbox should be verified before pods can be accessed.
Without at least these provisions, I see no possibility that this system can deliver user's control of the dissemination of their data.
If this is like 1989 www in development maturity, we should start seeing stuff interesting to the common folk in about 5 years. But, I was enjoying the internet before 1989. This level of development brings back good memories.
What about all of our fighters? Most can be slaved to other fighters, like F22s, right now and the new ones have no fully mechanical controls. They have extensive communications so that they can fight as automated teams, utilize each other's sensor suites, etc. If a hacker could get in, they could theoretically have a squadron at their control with pilots along as helpless hostages. I guess the pilots could destroy the flyability by punching out. It would be a very expensive loss if a whole squadron punched.
Or what about our guided missile frigates. Again, tons of communication channels and computer control. If the network could be penetrated, a hacker could wipe out a fleet with the ordinance a single frigate carries.
In many cases with current systems, the people are only in control because the software has been written to put them in the loop, and there are often modes of operation available but not used where they are only in the loop for the initial command. We even have systems where the people who are in the loop are at some location thousands of miles away. People in Washington can push the button to drop a bomb from a drone halfway around the world.
The point is, we already have highly automated, massively destructive systems that could be turned against us if the networks and systems could be hacked. This is nothing new. I worked on manned systems in the 90s that had enough automation and remote coordination that network security was a serious concern. We have been doing this for a long time.
Moreover, secure communications is something that has been critical to military operations forever. The first line of security is not the drivers and OS on a device, it is the network itself. Just disrupting the communications of advanced military devices is hard enough. Actually injecting your own traffic into these channels is way past the skill necessary to break into virtually anything else out there.
And once you're in, you're not usually going to find Linux or anything else you know. I worked on a mission computer operating system. It was 100% custom. There wasn't a single line of commercial code in that system. A hacker would find nothing familiar.
There is no new risk here. Virtually every modern weapon system is robotic and many are mostly autonomous with heavy usage of data channels for control. If hackers could take them over, we'd have long ago suffered these imagined catastrophes.
If $25 billion comes off of Tesla stock, Musk loses $5 billion. Investors, many of whom are bottom 90% folks investing 401K money, lose $20 billion. So, the vast majority of the punishment goes right by Musk. This is like dropping a bomb that causes 4 times as much collateral as strategic damage. Our government tries not to do things like this these days.
A fine would be more straightforward and hurt others less though I think even a smallish $2 billion or so fine would be devastating to Musk. He doesn't have over $20 billion. He has that much funny money/stock.
Trying to turn $2 billion of that into real money could be difficult. I don't think he has that much unleveraged stock that can be sold. In order to not lose control, he has taken out loans in lieu of selling stock. Those loans are backed by several times as much stock as the loans because the bankers have to feel guaranteed they will get their money even if the stock plummets. And nobody would loan him that much more without having $10 billion or so in unleveraged stock to back the $2 billion loan. He'd have to sell enough stock to pay off some of his loans which are backed by his stock. That would then free up the stock to sell. In the meantime, the stock would be dropping because he'd be endangering his control of the company's direction. So a $2 billion fine could end up costing him a multiple of that in net worth.
Certainly. But the SEC has a history of being practical more often than not. Whether Musk initiated the harm or not, they have the choice of limiting the harm or not. They do not serve the majority of the stockholders in not exercising those choices wisely.
Just as suicide by cop does not serve justice and most cops try to avoid participating in it if they can, the SEC will likely try to avoid being the instrument of a much greater destruction (at least 10-fold the losses in my estimates) than has already occurred.
I'm honestly not sure how to play those delivery numbers now. I was fixing to jump in for the expected 10% plus jump (trader here, no long investments with a recession in the wind). But, I'm in the camp that believes that Tesla without Musk at the helm will be just another car company instead of a company headed for a full vertical stack business in Transportation as a Service that is the only thing that can justify it being amongst the highest valued companies. To be valued in the $50+ billion range at this point in its life can only be justified by an expectation of a value that is a multiple of the top car company in the world in the decade out time frame because values don't stay flat while the company grows to its target.
Without his dynamism, they may not fail, but they will only succeed in having sparked the transition to electric, not in the more far-reaching task of rewriting the automotive business model which likely has another 15 years to critical mass. He also badly needs a Tesla worth several times more than today to gain the finances he'll need for Mars at about that same 15 year time frame. He needs a Tesla providing a few hundred billion miles a year of TaaS.
The SEC has to be very careful here because in punishing Musk for a 10% increase that hurt a few minority shorts, they could spark a 50%+ decrease that would be of far greater total monetary harm to the majority longs.
Many of the older, calmer investment experts I've read comment on this battle from the POV of experience say that the SEC will talk big but balance what they do to Musk with concern for their own potential of causing more damage than the momentary glitch Musk caused. 10% increases and decreases in Tesla are an expected norm. I personally consider the stock to be unchanged from a long-term POV as long as it stays between about 250 and 370. It is that volatile.
Good point. Though, perhaps the next level of evolution is to both make some noise and automatically turn on the indicator. It wouldn't be the required distance before the lane departure, but it would be something. You'd have to make sure there is no way to just have automatic indicators without an annoying warning noise though, otherwise you'd have the unintended consequence of everyone just thinking they don't need to manage their own indicators anymore.
I doubt that I'd find blind spot warnings to be of much extra help either. The few situations that might help are probably amongst those that it can't handle such as when people gun it out of a line of traffic behind you into a gap beside you right as you're trying to switch into the same faster lane or when someone comes into the blindspot from a direction that is out of the field of view of the mirror.
But, I'm human, and there are times that I have to drive when I am very upset or angry and adrenaline has a way of trashing the normal careful habits because it trashes thought. Having an audible tone during rare times of distraction could save me from a mistake, though car manufacturers have to cater to all and should have both audible and visual on anything critical.
Also, when thinking of these things as good drivers, I think we must keep in mind the small percentage of people who are actually good drivers most of the time. We cannot always defend ourselves from the mistakes of others. So we should also think of what we'd like the others to have in their vehicles.
Some of these numbers seem about like what I've observed of drivers who probably don't have these technologies. Within the past week I've had at least 4 drivers I can remember, including a bus driver and a truck driver, switch lanes while I was beside them. I doubt I drove more than about 80 miles total during that time - all in city traffic. I don't think the vehicles I remember were new enough to have blind spot monitoring or that I was really in a blind spot. Also, I drive about the same speed as the other traffic, so I was not approaching fast or anything that could have caused the issue. None of them looked.
Also, I've seen people going down the interstate reading newspapers, reading books, shaving, etc. most of my life. They were likely using plain old-fashioned non-adaptive cruise control. I don't know that 29% feeling comfortable doing other things while using their adaptive cruise control is a significant increase over regular cruise control without seeing the control group data.
AAA is all about changing people's behaviors. Even if these technologies show no increase in problems, they would still publish this story because they see a potential for improvement if people change. And they would always leave out the control group because they want to shock people.
In general, if a technology requires driver education to be effective, forget it in this country. The only question that matters is whether the statistics indicate there is a reduction in accidents with the technology. If there is, use the technology. The fact that some get killed who might not have without it is irrelevant. Only the average matters when looking for societal progress.
Way too expensive and limiting. :-)
As VR really comes into play or rather when it gets to the point, I would find virtual tourism much more interesting than most current games.
But, I also hope that they eventually develop the capability to generate virtual worlds to explore in the way old sci fi books did,,, i.e. for the purpose of exploring "what if" scenarios. Hopefully this age where good games have to be painstakingly developed by artists will be short-lived.
I never played Myst. But, recently, I attempted to find a game I'd like to play and couldn't. Much about Myst sounds like what I'd like in a game.
I have no desire to play any standard shoot em ups, especially against other people online. I did enjoy Splinter Cell years ago, though I find it very annoying to have such a set script or even a game that has an ending. A much more open world version of that would be far better.
What I believe I'd enjoy the most would be hiking or survival games based on real world locations with no scripting, extreme detail, operating mostly in real world time without acceleration (at least while the character is awake), and a lot of very realistic interaction with nature. The occasional need to avoid a bear or find food, water, or shelter is an OK introduction of violence as thoughtful planning is relaxing too. I'd just like the game to be beautiful, relaxing, complex, and unbounded.
I couldn't find anything that seemed to come close to catering to my needs. If I missed something, I'd love to hear suggestions.
I found it very boring that virtually every popular first person game was exactly the opposite of relaxing. The high-end gaming universe seems to have no variety at all and is almost all some version of shoot or otherwise damage the monster (human or not).
I had similar thoughts from a different angle. The headline represents a twisted view.
Would we rather they just continue to remove massive piles of cash from the economy? Even as an investor, I'd much rather see money being invested in research, development, and production growth than to have it sit doing nothing.
The fact that the cash reserves are still growing reflects a crisis of innovation in my mind. Please, innovate, grow, take risks. Don't just remove money from the economy and sit on it.
In my experience, I've always had to clean out old papers and trash when moving a business or business group into a "new" office. Much of that was just moving a group around within the facilities of a large corporation (one of the Dow 30), but, you'd think that would be better because the folks that moved out weren't losing their jobs.
I've actually encountered the same thing with houses. I've done some flipping, and it is remarkable how many people leave almost everything.
One home I rebuilt had been the home of a family with at least two young children. All of the clothes were still there, toys left where they had last been played with, kitchen fully stocked, dishes in the sink, bills in the drawers, all of the normal bathroom stuff in the bathroom, family pictures on the walls and in photo albums, and on and on. In my imagination, I figured they had been in a wreck or something where everyone died. I checked just to satisfy my curiosity and found that they had decided to move to Europe and just abandoned everything they couldn't take with them on the plane.
It is pretty much useless to the 85ish% that are in the Android ecosystem.
I use a Fitbit. It could be improved. It is annoying that it has to be charged every 5 days because that produces gaps in the data. It would also be nice if it had a bigger display. It can be difficult to read the heart rate at a glance with sweat in your eyes while you're running.
Mine doesn't have GPS or LTE but that is fine. Why would I want to pay twice for those features? I often talk on the phone while running (via bluetooth earbuds) so the phone is going with me no matter what.
The FCC has no right to mass appropriate property for the telecom companies. They seem to be trying it without even going through an eminent domain process. Since when did all local government owned property become the federal government's? Perhaps the feds would like to pay for all of its maintenance too.
A lot of the communities around me have sparse 3G/4G coverage because tall structures aren't allowed. These things are a community's right to determine. If the local citizens feel that the appearance of their community is more important than cellular access, so be it.
The degree to which the feds are pushing 5G seems off. It must have a massive backdoor or something.
Perhaps they are aiming to claim they have massively increased broadband availability for rural locations or something. If so, they need to change the definitions. The caps on cellular data price it well out of reach cost-wise for average Americans and it often doesn't allow tethering to support a home internet. I'm doing good to afford the $50/month for my cable internet. Thankfully, having that supply the WiFi at home keeps the cellular data used by our phones under 2GB per month so basic plans are good.
A definition like "broadband is defined as a 24/7 internet connection that delivers at least 25MB with no data caps no more than $50 per month and can provide for the full IoT environment in the home (connections that ban tethering wouldn't count)" would be good for judging whether an individual has coverage that allows them to have a basic home internet experience at a cost that most could handle.
In a free environment, a certain amount of risk must be allowed to exist. Otherwise, a back door to limiting freedoms opens up. If the requirements for enforcement become too costly, then the result will be the same as banning add-ins in the first place. If those costs are pushed to the add-in developers in some way, it furthermore results in unevenly banning add-ins because only larger-scale businesses could afford to attempt to enter the market. Regulations almost always favor large businesses by increasing cost-of-entry.
All that said, there are some ways that I can see things being made more secure. Google could force all add-ins to publish their code for review by any consumer. Or they could force the add-ins to run in sandboxes that can see and process the data but not send any data or derivative of the data outside of the client sandbox or a sandbox running on a Google-controlled and monitored server. But even if they did something like that, I'd want the ability as a consumer to give the business the right to collect my data if I so choose. There are applications I can imagine that might use my email data in combination with data collected elsewhere to provide or improve services not directly related to my email.