iPhones are NOT expensive... if you don't upgrade during every cycle. An iPhone 5c still runs just fine right now. There has been no change to internet browsing, text messaging, and phone calls that make it necessary to upgrade the 5c.
However, if you fancy yourself a photographer and thus need the best iPhone for the best camera. OK.
If you're a serious mobile gamer and need the best graphics and a phablet screen. OK
But, similarly, you need to understand that you're trying to get multiple high-performance devices squeezed into one-- and that's going to cost if it's the best on the market.
So it's not really, "This is too expensive" but instead "Is it really worth it to me at this price?".
Thank you for saying this! There are too many people online who can't differentiate between renders and reality so they don't read the article and they see "an object" and thus assume that said object is physically real and at least nearing production. Futurists do this a lot. "So and so is doing this! Amazing!" But when you read further, you see that it's an artist's rendering based on some ideas that a guy wrote on a napkin.
They may be at some point in planning, investigating, financing, etc.... but they certainly do not HAVE a product.
You're mixing terms but not 100% correct. Carpool/HOV lanes are rarely toll lanes so they're not sold back to you. They're restricted lanes for vehicles with 2+ or 3+ people in the vehicles. In all reality, if you gain a carpool partner, chances are that that person is sharing the cost of the commute and parking with you and thus you're obviously saving money.
However, you are correct in the effort to create artificial scarcity. And that's not hidden. The goal of a carpool lane is not necessarily to benefit those who would already carpool without one, but to entice those who are not carpooling to do so. The fewer drive-alone commuters on the road, the less congestion there is and everyone moves faster, pollutes less, and lives happier.
Oh my deity! Get over trying to find a silver bullet for education. It's a waste of time. There is no "knowledge economy", it's called "education" and "information". And we need a Netflix/Uber/Killer App for education like medicine needs a jackhammer for neurosurgery or penicillin for steel smelting. The success of one concept in one area does not imply that the framework would work in another environment.
Case in point: Coursera, Khan Academy, MIT lectures, and the like have done NOTHING to affect the education of the masses because the barrier to entry is too high for the masses and, most importantly, you must have continual will and commitment to seek these classes out and take them seriously to get a full education out of them. That's not to say that these concepts are without function. I've taken a couple Khan Academy courses and loved them... but then again, I have a 4-year degree and care enough to post on Slashdot. My wife watches stuff on Craftsy, but she is like me. In fact, all these programs are great for people who already have access to quality computers, broadband internet (mobile and wired), time, space, quiet, solitude, and SELF-STARTING WILLPOWER.
Look, education is hard. Like really, really hard. As a teacher, you have to gain trust, build relationships, and inspire before you even get down to the required curriculum. You have to react to individuals on the fly and remember how people change. You need to be sensitive to nuance in character, communication, and culture. No app can do that. No piece of software will build that trust.
Educating children is hard work. It takes time, effort, and passion (which dies with burnout). If you want to find a killer app to fix education, make one that magically properly funds our K-12 education so that teachers make a living wage appropriate for their region and hours of work, reduces class sizes to 20 children per class, and guarantees healthy food for everyone working or learning on a K-12 campus. Do that and watch education improve.
Because a "Netflix of Education" is going to do nothing for the masses. It's just a really nice idea to give Futurists happy thoughts about the next decade while ignoring the problem at hand.
So, this is the problem isn't it? Certain renewables "spiky" and without some sort of energy storage, the energy is effectively wasted. Lots of people like to say that excess energy can be stored in batteries, but really, those batteries are a pretty non-sustainable solution themselves.
This is why power companies just need to start using excess energy to split water and either store the hydrogen for use in a HFC power plant as needed or sell it for use in HFC vehicles.
It's so easy, Cal State LA is doing it and selling the hydrogen at the pump.
The way "tear up" is used the summary, it is conveyed that May is saying that she will "tear up" human rights law in the linked article. She didn't say that. The Labor Party as has said, per the article, "by ripping up basic rights".
May actually tweeted, "I'm clear: if human rights laws get in the way of tackling extremism and terrorism, we will change those laws to keep British people safe." (https://twitter.com/theresa_may/status/872181737933217794?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedailybeast.com%2Ftheresa-may-if-human-rights-laws-get-in-our-way-we-will-change-them)
There's no need to compromise your integrity to sully May. She's doing well enough on her own.
Stop looking at what everyone else is doing. If you can do better, then do better.
Using the most vague terms possible, if the United States emits 50% the carbon of China and China emits an insane amount, then the US emits 50% of an insane amount. That means it's a worthwhile endeavor for the US to reduce its emissions.
English will be an important language for the next couple hundred years. Chinese recently became an important language to know (within the last 30 years). What English (as a language) is losing isn't important, but dominance. Twenty years ago, you would have heard that EVERYONE should learn English because it's the global language of business. Today, economics has changed and now you can be part of the global market while not knowing English. Moreover, with the (marginally) dominant nationalist/isolationist politics of Britain and America, globally minded countries will look to other countries (and thus their languages) for partnerships... but English will still be important.
The minute you start differentiating your customers based on philosophy and writings (differentiated from inciting violence), you enable the powers that be to re-define "hate" and "extremism" as "speech we don't like" so that dissenters can be silenced.
Freedoms come at costs. The cost of free speech is acknowledging that ALL speech is free so long as it doesn't directly lead to the harming of another person. Keep the Black Lives Matters websites. Keep the Nazi websites. Keep them all. But, you must also sufficiently educate your populace to the logical and ethical issues inherent in hate so that people are LESS LIKELY to HATE. Attacking a website does nothing but further embolden those that hate.
It's nice to think that simply spreading good ideas is good enough... but it's not and it never has been. You know how many Black slaves in America had the "idea" of freedom? What about the number of women who surely liked the "idea" of universal suffrage? And how many workers had the "idea" of working less per week for a guaranteed wage?
Ideas are great, but in a representative system ("government") CHANGE only comes when people imbued with sufficient power make the effort to evolve an idea into policy. Even if today's politicians/leaders don't like an idea and get removed from office, someone is going to have to take a leadership position to make changes to the official way things are done.
"With so much focus in politics, the world is in danger of forgetting that so much of what really changes the future happens outside completely of politics. It happens inside the mind of dreamers, designers, inventors, technologists, entrepreneurs,"
No. Your personal interpretation and your world view change *internally* with ideas. How you and others are physically affected relies on what "ideas" politicians have and put forth as policy. Politics, however fatiguing, is not unimportant.
First, the definition of "college" has changed. It used to mean a 2-4 year, brick-and-mortar school for obtaining a bachelor's degree, master's degree, or doctorate. Now, it effectively means that any institution *or company* with an accreditation giving classes for people outside of the K-12 system. Your profit-profit, distance learning companies have facilitated a massive portion of this debt and provided a proportionally small ability for the debtors to actually pay the debt off.
Second, and happily, more people are actually going to college, so with any amount of individual debt, the numerical increase in students will increase the amount of total debt.
Third, prior to the recession of the mid-2000s, major universities saw themselves as competing for undergraduate students. Why? Because those students can bring in an almost-unlimited amount of Federal student loan money. My own university leased out massive amounts of land to a company to build beautiful (read: expensive) student housing to attract more and more undergraduates instead of historically standard (read: sufficient and cheap) student housing. So, colleges and universities expanded because they had a new influx of students and the government was willing to lend them whatever amount necessary for their education. And prices went up... QUICK.
In my first year at a major public research university in California in 2000, my annual tuition and fees cost $4,057. (That doesn't include things like books, housing, transportation, etc.) The cost in 1996 was $4,050. When I graduated, the annual tuition and fees and increased to $7,475-- an 84% increase in just a few years. This year, at the very same campus, tuition and fees cost $15,166 per year. That's almost a 375% increase over 17 years and it has everything to do with the unlimited access to federal student loans.
Lastly, consider that my numbers are just for tuition and fees. Housing costs skyrocketed in the same time. As did the cost of textbooks as well as has (for better or worse) the standard of living which includes smartphones and data plans.
... but a lot of these seem different. I can't help but think that they were held back because of how terrifying the imagery is. Some in particular (https://goo.gl/PviFuq , https://goo.gl/cl1QlR) look like the bomb is creating a sun on Earth which then begins to destroy the Earth. If these videos were available in the 70's, 80's, or 90s, I think nuclear disarmament would have been a much more attainable goal because the severity of the risk would have been even more understood.
I don't trust autonomous vehicles because I don't have any reason to. I don't trust Google's or Apple's or Tesla's autonomous vehicles because we in the public (even us nerds) haven't seen enough data to trust them. While someone cited a stat earlier in the conversation like "a human has had to take control once in 5,000 miles", that's not enough. Where were those 5,000 miles? At what speed? What was the other traffic like? Were these 5,000 miles of continually changing conditions or 5,000 of crawling rush hour traffic in San Francisco over a year of testing?
We have learned over the years that when someone proposes a major risk-based endeavor, there always needs some sort of third-party verifier of relative safety. (The CPSC, NTSB, NITSA, PCI, etc.) And those who complain about "hindering innovation" put their own profitability ahead of the safety of their customers. Do we have ANY third-party organization like this yet to test the safety/reaction capability of autonomous vehicles in a controlled environment? Do they have a standardized testing facility?
I don't think we do.
I think everyone who has been working on this tech have selected/developed their own facilities, tests, and standards. And to a certain extent, that's to be expected. But look at all the RECENT times when tech innovation has out-paced regulation: Uber ("disruptive", but massive amounts of illegal practices), Dot Com Boom (pump and dump!), IoT (zombie refrigerators!), Always-On Entertainment Tech (CIA...).
There is no need to rush autonomous vehicles except to build venture capital (investment gambling) and bring in profit. Some people say it's directly related to sustainability, but we can't even settle on a single EV plug standard or EVSE payment system (because the same people say these vehicle will be pure-electric).
And I say this as someone who actually works in sustainability and transportation!
> Honestly, I think grad student projects should be almost entirely reproducing other results.
I'd say half their time. In fact, their first half. If you want to be allowed 4 years to work on your own creation, you need to do 4 years of replicability studies and publish the findings. As academia adapts to more stringent standards of replicability, the 50% concept can be reduced, but this needs to be a multi-generational thing.
So very much this. I was talking with an MBA friend of mine who can't wait to get his 6-digits so he can wholly invest in property because "Every house appreciates in value!" I asked him, "Why does a house that degrades over time go up in value?"
He was stumped, but then came to terms with the response, "Well, people need homes. People build homes where people want to live (near large employment areas, beaches, etc.) and people want to buy there. Supply & demand drives up prices for the limited number of homes."
I respond, "So it's not that the actual value of the house or land goes up, it's that more people in the market need homes near where they work. Your goal is to buy those homes and make them pay more money than the value of the home so you can get money while not actually providing a product or improving on an existing product. Is that right?"
"Jeez, man. You make me sound like a real dick when you put it that way..."
My wife and I make over $100k together and we can't yet afford a 2b/2ba condo in Orange County, CA within a 30 minute commute to work. That kind of place with a garage goes for ~$500k. Thus, if you don't want PMI, you need to have $100k in cash on hand PLUS financial buffer and moving costs. So we rent. We pay ~$1,845/mo for our 1b/1ba. And there's a catch-- lease renewal increases are around $50, but the increase is lower than the ~$90/mo annual market rental increase over the last few years. So, if you want to move, you're almost guaranteed to be moving into a more expensive apartment.
And there still isn't any inventory to buy. There are too many people buying to turn around and immediately rent out those places.
So, despite out income and despite our savings, we're staying put.
Patriotism has never been a dirty word. Misuse of the words "patriot" and "patriotism", though, has stained the words to the point where they're immediately associated with something being covered up (see: USA PATRIOT Act).
Nationalism, though, has been a dirty word since the '40s when nationalism's big brother "Fascism" became a bit of an issue for people living in the countries immediately adjacent.
And the world's not insane. It's just that people disagree. It has always been that way and it will always be that way. If you want it to feel less "insane" spend some time understanding why people make the decisions they do. Once you understand, they're not so much "crazy" as they are in different circumstances.
It kills me. There are so many vaporware projects out there that banked entirely on peoples' lack of understanding of where tech has advanced and where they hope it will be tomorrow.
When I saw the advertisement for this drone, my immediate thought was, "No. They don't have something that can do that. And they won't deliver something that can do that in a year." I'm not a pessimist. I just understand, like most Slashadotters, what is possible today vs. what is possible with Google's money vs. what is possible with a few guys' passion. There was no reason to believe that this project could be completed. Vaporware.
Same goes for Solar Roadways (http://www.solarroadways.com/). People LOVE the idea of our massive road and highway system generating massive amounts of energy from the sun. These people say they know how to make it happen and that they're starting to get funding and permission to test it. But, again, almost everyone on Slashdot can attest to the currently insurmountable issues of durability, transparency, friction, wiring, cost, etc. Vaporware.
Let's look at Google's recently cancelled "solar-powered, autonomous gliders beaming internet to the masses" idea. Who here thought that was going to come to fruition? Anyone? I sure hope not. Vaporware.
What annoys me most is that in-between vaporware and delivery. Where there's so much hype, rational demand, and funding but the obstacles are so huge, that we know the promises can't ever be met within the time-frame promised, but oooooh, we want to believe! I'm talking about genuine autonomous vehicles. The tech isn't here yet. We all see the potential. We know the tech will be here, but it's *not* here. Still the hype says, "The future is now! We're just working out some kinks and, oh, you know these silly lawmakers and safety experts!" People talk about autonomous vehicles flooding the American roads in the next couple years. And, really, it's just to get more investment capital. Within the next couple years, I know we'll see much more automated driver assist in vehicles (auto-braking, proximity alerts, etc.), but I have absolutely zero expectation of being able to, within the next couple years, hail a car, have it show up at my home, take me to an address I specify, and do so safely, affordably, without a driver, and without massive liability on me.
That line said nothing about ACA taking credit for the reduction. It simply says that the law is working towards that same goal with the added focus of reducing racial disparities.
Ehh... I think the better tack is to reinforce that preventing cancer is a cheaper and more effective tactic than treating it. As in all things "health and safety", prevention trumps mitigation.
So much this! A massive portion of Windows users have more than one window open at a time. Sometimes, they need to have these windows parallel to each other. Massive empty/whitespace eliminates the ability to multi-task.
At the very least, give the option to re-skin!
It's wrong in the same way that running your car's engine to the redline before every shift and then complaining that your car overheats is wrong. There is a correct and incorrect way to run any machine to get the intended results for the intended lifespan of the machine.
1. Load page layouts, scripts, graphics, videos, & sound so that when you intentionally trigger something, your requested action happens *mostly* quick.
2. Sites want to earn money. That means that non-mission-related stuff (advertising) must get loaded as well. This is often worse than the simple text that most of us are actually seeking out.
3. Weed out malicious crap. Given the sheer amount of malicious crap out there, we're asking out browsers to do 99% of our due diligence for us. That means checking every little thing against massive blacklists and whitelists so that someone in Nigeria doesn't get the ability to turn on your webcam while you're getting intimate with the misses and extort you for money.
4. To allow us to do a billion different transactions through the same window. Bank transactions. Credit transactions. Messaging. And on and on...
5. Sometimes it goes to space and back... and then through a hundred other computers.
I haven't read this article yet, but I plan to and then dig some more. As someone working in sustainability (waste, water, GHG emissions, etc.) for a very, very large organization, I can't help but wonder if the orgs that were customers of Brundage will have any certifications they gained by using his recycling business revoked and if they will be fined for not meeting attainment goals retroactively.
Slashdot Mirror
iPhones are NOT expensive... if you don't upgrade during every cycle. An iPhone 5c still runs just fine right now. There has been no change to internet browsing, text messaging, and phone calls that make it necessary to upgrade the 5c.
However, if you fancy yourself a photographer and thus need the best iPhone for the best camera. OK.
If you're a serious mobile gamer and need the best graphics and a phablet screen. OK
But, similarly, you need to understand that you're trying to get multiple high-performance devices squeezed into one-- and that's going to cost if it's the best on the market.
So it's not really, "This is too expensive" but instead "Is it really worth it to me at this price?".
Thank you for saying this! There are too many people online who can't differentiate between renders and reality so they don't read the article and they see "an object" and thus assume that said object is physically real and at least nearing production. Futurists do this a lot. "So and so is doing this! Amazing!" But when you read further, you see that it's an artist's rendering based on some ideas that a guy wrote on a napkin.
... but they certainly do not HAVE a product.
They may be at some point in planning, investigating, financing, etc.
You're mixing terms but not 100% correct. Carpool/HOV lanes are rarely toll lanes so they're not sold back to you. They're restricted lanes for vehicles with 2+ or 3+ people in the vehicles. In all reality, if you gain a carpool partner, chances are that that person is sharing the cost of the commute and parking with you and thus you're obviously saving money.
However, you are correct in the effort to create artificial scarcity. And that's not hidden. The goal of a carpool lane is not necessarily to benefit those who would already carpool without one, but to entice those who are not carpooling to do so. The fewer drive-alone commuters on the road, the less congestion there is and everyone moves faster, pollutes less, and lives happier.
Oh my deity! Get over trying to find a silver bullet for education. It's a waste of time. There is no "knowledge economy", it's called "education" and "information". And we need a Netflix/Uber/Killer App for education like medicine needs a jackhammer for neurosurgery or penicillin for steel smelting. The success of one concept in one area does not imply that the framework would work in another environment.
Case in point: Coursera, Khan Academy, MIT lectures, and the like have done NOTHING to affect the education of the masses because the barrier to entry is too high for the masses and, most importantly, you must have continual will and commitment to seek these classes out and take them seriously to get a full education out of them. That's not to say that these concepts are without function. I've taken a couple Khan Academy courses and loved them... but then again, I have a 4-year degree and care enough to post on Slashdot. My wife watches stuff on Craftsy, but she is like me. In fact, all these programs are great for people who already have access to quality computers, broadband internet (mobile and wired), time, space, quiet, solitude, and SELF-STARTING WILLPOWER.
Look, education is hard. Like really, really hard. As a teacher, you have to gain trust, build relationships, and inspire before you even get down to the required curriculum. You have to react to individuals on the fly and remember how people change. You need to be sensitive to nuance in character, communication, and culture. No app can do that. No piece of software will build that trust.
Educating children is hard work. It takes time, effort, and passion (which dies with burnout). If you want to find a killer app to fix education, make one that magically properly funds our K-12 education so that teachers make a living wage appropriate for their region and hours of work, reduces class sizes to 20 children per class, and guarantees healthy food for everyone working or learning on a K-12 campus. Do that and watch education improve.
Because a "Netflix of Education" is going to do nothing for the masses. It's just a really nice idea to give Futurists happy thoughts about the next decade while ignoring the problem at hand.
So, this is the problem isn't it? Certain renewables "spiky" and without some sort of energy storage, the energy is effectively wasted. Lots of people like to say that excess energy can be stored in batteries, but really, those batteries are a pretty non-sustainable solution themselves.
This is why power companies just need to start using excess energy to split water and either store the hydrogen for use in a HFC power plant as needed or sell it for use in HFC vehicles.
It's so easy, Cal State LA is doing it and selling the hydrogen at the pump.
The way "tear up" is used the summary, it is conveyed that May is saying that she will "tear up" human rights law in the linked article. She didn't say that. The Labor Party as has said, per the article, "by ripping up basic rights".
May actually tweeted, "I'm clear: if human rights laws get in the way of tackling extremism and terrorism, we will change those laws to keep British people safe." (https://twitter.com/theresa_may/status/872181737933217794?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedailybeast.com%2Ftheresa-may-if-human-rights-laws-get-in-our-way-we-will-change-them)
There's no need to compromise your integrity to sully May. She's doing well enough on her own.
Stop looking at what everyone else is doing. If you can do better, then do better. Using the most vague terms possible, if the United States emits 50% the carbon of China and China emits an insane amount, then the US emits 50% of an insane amount. That means it's a worthwhile endeavor for the US to reduce its emissions.
English will be an important language for the next couple hundred years. Chinese recently became an important language to know (within the last 30 years). What English (as a language) is losing isn't important, but dominance. Twenty years ago, you would have heard that EVERYONE should learn English because it's the global language of business. Today, economics has changed and now you can be part of the global market while not knowing English. Moreover, with the (marginally) dominant nationalist/isolationist politics of Britain and America, globally minded countries will look to other countries (and thus their languages) for partnerships... but English will still be important.
The minute you start differentiating your customers based on philosophy and writings (differentiated from inciting violence), you enable the powers that be to re-define "hate" and "extremism" as "speech we don't like" so that dissenters can be silenced. Freedoms come at costs. The cost of free speech is acknowledging that ALL speech is free so long as it doesn't directly lead to the harming of another person. Keep the Black Lives Matters websites. Keep the Nazi websites. Keep them all. But, you must also sufficiently educate your populace to the logical and ethical issues inherent in hate so that people are LESS LIKELY to HATE. Attacking a website does nothing but further embolden those that hate.
Ideas are great, but in a representative system ("government") CHANGE only comes when people imbued with sufficient power make the effort to evolve an idea into policy. Even if today's politicians/leaders don't like an idea and get removed from office, someone is going to have to take a leadership position to make changes to the official way things are done.
"With so much focus in politics, the world is in danger of forgetting that so much of what really changes the future happens outside completely of politics. It happens inside the mind of dreamers, designers, inventors, technologists, entrepreneurs,"
No. Your personal interpretation and your world view change *internally* with ideas. How you and others are physically affected relies on what "ideas" politicians have and put forth as policy. Politics, however fatiguing, is not unimportant.
First, the definition of "college" has changed. It used to mean a 2-4 year, brick-and-mortar school for obtaining a bachelor's degree, master's degree, or doctorate. Now, it effectively means that any institution *or company* with an accreditation giving classes for people outside of the K-12 system. Your profit-profit, distance learning companies have facilitated a massive portion of this debt and provided a proportionally small ability for the debtors to actually pay the debt off.
Second, and happily, more people are actually going to college, so with any amount of individual debt, the numerical increase in students will increase the amount of total debt.
Third, prior to the recession of the mid-2000s, major universities saw themselves as competing for undergraduate students. Why? Because those students can bring in an almost-unlimited amount of Federal student loan money. My own university leased out massive amounts of land to a company to build beautiful (read: expensive) student housing to attract more and more undergraduates instead of historically standard (read: sufficient and cheap) student housing. So, colleges and universities expanded because they had a new influx of students and the government was willing to lend them whatever amount necessary for their education. And prices went up... QUICK.
In my first year at a major public research university in California in 2000, my annual tuition and fees cost $4,057. (That doesn't include things like books, housing, transportation, etc.) The cost in 1996 was $4,050. When I graduated, the annual tuition and fees and increased to $7,475-- an 84% increase in just a few years. This year, at the very same campus, tuition and fees cost $15,166 per year. That's almost a 375% increase over 17 years and it has everything to do with the unlimited access to federal student loans.
Lastly, consider that my numbers are just for tuition and fees. Housing costs skyrocketed in the same time. As did the cost of textbooks as well as has (for better or worse) the standard of living which includes smartphones and data plans.
... but a lot of these seem different. I can't help but think that they were held back because of how terrifying the imagery is. Some in particular (https://goo.gl/PviFuq , https://goo.gl/cl1QlR) look like the bomb is creating a sun on Earth which then begins to destroy the Earth. If these videos were available in the 70's, 80's, or 90s, I think nuclear disarmament would have been a much more attainable goal because the severity of the risk would have been even more understood.
I don't trust autonomous vehicles because I don't have any reason to. I don't trust Google's or Apple's or Tesla's autonomous vehicles because we in the public (even us nerds) haven't seen enough data to trust them. While someone cited a stat earlier in the conversation like "a human has had to take control once in 5,000 miles", that's not enough. Where were those 5,000 miles? At what speed? What was the other traffic like? Were these 5,000 miles of continually changing conditions or 5,000 of crawling rush hour traffic in San Francisco over a year of testing?
We have learned over the years that when someone proposes a major risk-based endeavor, there always needs some sort of third-party verifier of relative safety. (The CPSC, NTSB, NITSA, PCI, etc.) And those who complain about "hindering innovation" put their own profitability ahead of the safety of their customers. Do we have ANY third-party organization like this yet to test the safety/reaction capability of autonomous vehicles in a controlled environment? Do they have a standardized testing facility?
I don't think we do.
I think everyone who has been working on this tech have selected/developed their own facilities, tests, and standards. And to a certain extent, that's to be expected. But look at all the RECENT times when tech innovation has out-paced regulation: Uber ("disruptive", but massive amounts of illegal practices), Dot Com Boom (pump and dump!), IoT (zombie refrigerators!), Always-On Entertainment Tech (CIA...).
There is no need to rush autonomous vehicles except to build venture capital (investment gambling) and bring in profit. Some people say it's directly related to sustainability, but we can't even settle on a single EV plug standard or EVSE payment system (because the same people say these vehicle will be pure-electric).
And I say this as someone who actually works in sustainability and transportation!
> Honestly, I think grad student projects should be almost entirely reproducing other results.
I'd say half their time. In fact, their first half. If you want to be allowed 4 years to work on your own creation, you need to do 4 years of replicability studies and publish the findings. As academia adapts to more stringent standards of replicability, the 50% concept can be reduced, but this needs to be a multi-generational thing.
So very much this. I was talking with an MBA friend of mine who can't wait to get his 6-digits so he can wholly invest in property because "Every house appreciates in value!" I asked him, "Why does a house that degrades over time go up in value?"
He was stumped, but then came to terms with the response, "Well, people need homes. People build homes where people want to live (near large employment areas, beaches, etc.) and people want to buy there. Supply & demand drives up prices for the limited number of homes."
I respond, "So it's not that the actual value of the house or land goes up, it's that more people in the market need homes near where they work. Your goal is to buy those homes and make them pay more money than the value of the home so you can get money while not actually providing a product or improving on an existing product. Is that right?"
"Jeez, man. You make me sound like a real dick when you put it that way..."
And then we got back to work.
My wife and I make over $100k together and we can't yet afford a 2b/2ba condo in Orange County, CA within a 30 minute commute to work. That kind of place with a garage goes for ~$500k. Thus, if you don't want PMI, you need to have $100k in cash on hand PLUS financial buffer and moving costs. So we rent. We pay ~$1,845/mo for our 1b/1ba. And there's a catch-- lease renewal increases are around $50, but the increase is lower than the ~$90/mo annual market rental increase over the last few years. So, if you want to move, you're almost guaranteed to be moving into a more expensive apartment.
And there still isn't any inventory to buy. There are too many people buying to turn around and immediately rent out those places.
So, despite out income and despite our savings, we're staying put.
Patriotism has never been a dirty word. Misuse of the words "patriot" and "patriotism", though, has stained the words to the point where they're immediately associated with something being covered up (see: USA PATRIOT Act).
Nationalism, though, has been a dirty word since the '40s when nationalism's big brother "Fascism" became a bit of an issue for people living in the countries immediately adjacent.
And the world's not insane. It's just that people disagree. It has always been that way and it will always be that way. If you want it to feel less "insane" spend some time understanding why people make the decisions they do. Once you understand, they're not so much "crazy" as they are in different circumstances.
It kills me. There are so many vaporware projects out there that banked entirely on peoples' lack of understanding of where tech has advanced and where they hope it will be tomorrow.
When I saw the advertisement for this drone, my immediate thought was, "No. They don't have something that can do that. And they won't deliver something that can do that in a year." I'm not a pessimist. I just understand, like most Slashadotters, what is possible today vs. what is possible with Google's money vs. what is possible with a few guys' passion. There was no reason to believe that this project could be completed. Vaporware.
Same goes for Solar Roadways (http://www.solarroadways.com/). People LOVE the idea of our massive road and highway system generating massive amounts of energy from the sun. These people say they know how to make it happen and that they're starting to get funding and permission to test it. But, again, almost everyone on Slashdot can attest to the currently insurmountable issues of durability, transparency, friction, wiring, cost, etc. Vaporware.
Let's look at Google's recently cancelled "solar-powered, autonomous gliders beaming internet to the masses" idea. Who here thought that was going to come to fruition? Anyone? I sure hope not. Vaporware.
What annoys me most is that in-between vaporware and delivery. Where there's so much hype, rational demand, and funding but the obstacles are so huge, that we know the promises can't ever be met within the time-frame promised, but oooooh, we want to believe! I'm talking about genuine autonomous vehicles. The tech isn't here yet. We all see the potential. We know the tech will be here, but it's *not* here. Still the hype says, "The future is now! We're just working out some kinks and, oh, you know these silly lawmakers and safety experts!" People talk about autonomous vehicles flooding the American roads in the next couple years. And, really, it's just to get more investment capital. Within the next couple years, I know we'll see much more automated driver assist in vehicles (auto-braking, proximity alerts, etc.), but I have absolutely zero expectation of being able to, within the next couple years, hail a car, have it show up at my home, take me to an address I specify, and do so safely, affordably, without a driver, and without massive liability on me.
That line said nothing about ACA taking credit for the reduction. It simply says that the law is working towards that same goal with the added focus of reducing racial disparities.
Ehh... I think the better tack is to reinforce that preventing cancer is a cheaper and more effective tactic than treating it. As in all things "health and safety", prevention trumps mitigation.
So much this! A massive portion of Windows users have more than one window open at a time. Sometimes, they need to have these windows parallel to each other. Massive empty/whitespace eliminates the ability to multi-task. At the very least, give the option to re-skin!
Maybe, just maybe, the entirety of Nintendo's stock value isn't dependent on the success of an app.
It's wrong in the same way that running your car's engine to the redline before every shift and then complaining that your car overheats is wrong. There is a correct and incorrect way to run any machine to get the intended results for the intended lifespan of the machine.
Look, a browser has to do a lot. A WHOLE LOT.
1. Load page layouts, scripts, graphics, videos, & sound so that when you intentionally trigger something, your requested action happens *mostly* quick.
2. Sites want to earn money. That means that non-mission-related stuff (advertising) must get loaded as well. This is often worse than the simple text that most of us are actually seeking out.
3. Weed out malicious crap. Given the sheer amount of malicious crap out there, we're asking out browsers to do 99% of our due diligence for us. That means checking every little thing against massive blacklists and whitelists so that someone in Nigeria doesn't get the ability to turn on your webcam while you're getting intimate with the misses and extort you for money.
4. To allow us to do a billion different transactions through the same window. Bank transactions. Credit transactions. Messaging. And on and on...
5. Sometimes it goes to space and back... and then through a hundred other computers.
I haven't read this article yet, but I plan to and then dig some more. As someone working in sustainability (waste, water, GHG emissions, etc.) for a very, very large organization, I can't help but wonder if the orgs that were customers of Brundage will have any certifications they gained by using his recycling business revoked and if they will be fined for not meeting attainment goals retroactively.