A certain proportion of the population seems to be unable to control themselves. Whether it be tobacco, sugar, alcohol, fat or some other substance that isn't good for you in large quantities. This is where they make their money. The majority alcohol is bought by heavy drinkers. I would imagine that the same is true for products like Coke. I know some people who drink 6 cans a day of Coke. I'll buy a 12 pack and it will last me a couple months. You aren't going to convince the people who are consuming massive amounts of this stuff to all of a sudden stop consuming it. Maybe a few people will see the light, but a lot of people will never stop. I think the only way is to get people before they start. It's going to take generations of change for the problem to go away.
The way I see it they had an awesome idea and ended up killing their own business by being too greedy. The barber example is perfect. Why not have the same barber sell 20 coupons every month for 2 years instead of selling 400 coupons in a single month, and not be able to fulfill them. The barber would be more able to actually meet the demand, and would be a repeat customer of Groupon, and would probably result in a few more repeat customers for the barber. They pushed businesses to sell more coupons than they could possibly deal with, which resulted in both Groupon and the business looking bad. The majority of stuff I see on Groupon now stuff like online courses that don't really have much in the way of increased costs for the extra business.
Re:Going to Mars is a bad idea
on
Let's Not Go To Mars
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
What really cemented my belief that going to Mars is impossible with current technology is this article. The biggest thing to me is just how much supplies you need to sustain yourself for the trip. 3 million pounds worth of supplies. That's 60 shuttle launches worth of supplies. Sure there's rockets that can lift more than the shuttle could, but even with those heavy lifter rockets, you're probably looking at around 30 launches just to get the gear into space. Then there's the problem of being stuck in a tin can for 9-12 months, and still being in good enough shape to do something useful once you get there.
If you want to come back, the minimum stay is 3-4 months while you wait for the planets to line up again. And there is no turn around option like with the Apollo missions. Once you are on your way, there's no way to bail out and come back quickly in the event of an emergency.
The Germans had a similar problem in World War II from what I remember. They built some extremely advanced and expensive tanks, but they couldn't build a lot of them. Along come the Russians with thousands of cheap, light tanks, and they basically run circles around the Germans. The US also had the Liberty Ship which they could build very fast. It didn't matter that the Germans were sinking a lot of ships with their u-boats, because the Americans just deployed more boats than the Germans could deal with.
You pinpointed the reason this will never work. It's too much trouble for the home owner. We can't even get people to recycle and compost in my area, because the people who own the houses would rather just throw everything in a single bin. Having automated pickup is going to cause so many more problems. If the trash doesn't get picked up because the robot didn't like the orientation of the bin, do you have to wait another week for the garbage to get picked up? What happens when you have a little bit more garbage than usual and you can't fit it all in the standard bin?
We actually have the mechanical arms and standardized bins for compost, and they never use them. The guys doing the pickup have figured out it's much easier just to do it by hand. They can get the route done in less time and have more time to enjoy themselves.
what possible excuse is there for "This update breaks VPNs" to not be treated as an absolute showstopper
This is what happens when you try to make a software update part of a hardware roll-out. They have hardware that they want to ship at a specific date, but haven't had any chance to get the software tested out in a while. They basically had to release iOS 9 even though they knew there was bugs because it was necessary for the new iPad and iPhone models.
The great thing about SD card expansion isn't that I can swap out cards, but rather than I can choose the amount of storage I have available on my phone without paying ridiculous amounts of money for it.
That's the problem with the iPhone. I would have to spend $200 more, totaling $850 to get the 128 GB version. Instead, I could buy an Android or Windows phone with SDXC support for $300, and spend $60 for a 128 GB Micro SD Card. $360 total for the Android or Windows setup, or $850 for the iPhone. That's a $490 difference.
Apple tells you that their internal memory is faster than SD cards, and it may just be, but most people don't need extremely fast speeds when they're just playing movies or music off of it anyway. SD Cards are even fast enough to record 1080p video. So it's not like most people have a use case for faster storage on their phone.
Sure, lots of kids go to university, and lots of them even graduate, but I still don't think a large percentage of those people couldn't invent something new or advance scientific understanding. The Fizz Buzz test is a perfect example of this. Even people who have undergone a lot of training can't come up with a solution to a simple problem that they've never seen before. They are find doing grunt work programming because they aren't encountering problems that they haven't seen before. If they do, they Google it and look for code from someone else who has already solved a similar problem to what they are doing. I've met quite a few "programmers" in my day who were unable to complete even the simplest of tasks, and even with a lot of guidance would fail to solve the simplest of problems.
Updates are the reason that I went with Windows this round over Android. My last Android phone never saw a single update, and was stuck on 2.3 for the 3 years I owned it, even though it was released 6 months before Android 4 came out. Windows Phone seems to be much more likely to get updates than most Android phones. I've already received 1 update on my current phone that I've had for 5 months, so it's already a better track record than my last Android phone. As long as it gets Windows 10 (which it seems it will from what I'm hearing) it will have met my expectations for updates.
I don't mind the fact that Apple sells a 16 GB iPhone. My current Windows Phone is 8 GB. What I do mind is that there's a 16 GB phone without expandable storage. 16 GB would be fine if you could offload the music, movies, and pictures to an SD card. Even if that was all the SD card functioned for on an iPhone, it would be a lot better than the current situation. But the 16 GB of storage for everything that you want on your phone is a huge limitation.
Does it deposit $400 in my back account? Because that's about the price difference between the lowest priced current iPhone and what I spent on my last 2 phones, which were previously Android, and currently Windows. I don't particularly like iOS, and probably wouldn't choose it anyway, but the high price of the devices is what really keeps me away from even considering it. Especially considering that my last 2 phones have been very sufficient in their specifications, and I really don't think I'd have a better experience with my phone if it was 3mm thinner, or had a slightly faster processor.
The other thing I like about Android and Windows is that with the phones I choose, I can use an SD card to expand the storage. This is something that's important to me because even a small amount of media (videos, photos, music) can quickly fill up the 16GB iPhone. For $15 I can get a 32 GB MicroSD, and be able to bring way more stuff with me than I could on an iPhone, for a fraction of the price it would cost to upgrade to an iPhone with a reasonable amount of storage.
Games are big because of the high resolution of the iPad. It has a resolution of 2048Ã--1536. That's higher resolution than any game console does, and higher than the average home desktop monitor. When you have high resolution, you need more pixels in the textures and videos for your games, or they are going to look sub-par.
I think that not having expandable storage at this point hurts them more than it helps them. My wife got an iPad and there was only 12 GB of usable space out of the box. Download a couple movies, add a couple hundred pictures, a few modest sized apps, and the thing is already filled up.
I would question whether people with this usage pattern would just be better off with a cheaper Android or Windows phone. Why pay $700 for a phone if you just you it to send text messages and run few simple apps? If Apple wants to maintain their high end customer base, they should at least have their phones reasonably high end.
I'm not saying it's 1 or 2 people, I'm saying it's a small percentage of the population. When you reach a population of 100 million people, even having 1/1000 people who can think well enough to advance past farming means that you have 100,000 people who can work to complete this goal. Maybe only.01 % of people are smart enough to be rocket scientists and send a rocket to the moon. But that still creates a pool of 20000 rockets scientists just from the US population to allow the Apollo program to be done.
I loved these books, but there's a huge flaw in that explanation. A fraction of infinity is still infinity. If the universe is infinite, then there are by definition infinite planets with life on them. Granted, the population density of the universe still tends towards infinity because there is so much space between planets that support life, but the actual population in an infinite universe would be infinite.
Also, radio transmissions seem like a stop-gap solution. Even in our short technological history, we've gone from using very strong radio signals to send signals very far, to using weaker signals to send signals short distances and transmit data long distances using wires or fiber optics. Perhaps in 100 or 200 years, there will be very few radio signals used to actually transmit data. Or at least not many that would be detectable outside our own atmosphere. Even communication with spacecraft could be done using lasers as opposed to using radio waves.
I would tend to agree. Even within our own human population it seems that only a relatively small number of people have allowed us to advance past the age of agriculture, into the age of electronics and interconnected networks. If the average person was just a little bit dumber, we probably wouldn't be able to sustain the level of technology we currently have. If the average IQ of people was closer to where an IQ of 75 currently is, we'd probably never reach the point where the average person could read, because they would lack the cognitive capacity to do it, or it would take so much training for such a low level of reading, that the effort would be close to useless.
What bothers me about this case is that nobody every seriously thought it was bomb.
He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward.
âoeShe was like, it looks like a bomb,â he said.
âoeI told her, âIt doesnâ(TM)t look like a bomb to me.â(TM)â
The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldnâ(TM)t get it back.
So, the teacher thought she was in possession of a bomb, in the school, and then let the student go on to his next class.
If you really suspected it was a bomb, would you keep the device with you? Would you let the person who brought it in out of your sight? Would you not ring the fire alarm to evacuate the school?
This is what most people don't get. Even if you could design a valid system, how do you verify that the terminal you walk up to on election day is actually running the valid software? How do you even determine that it's a valid machine to begin with?
I think the biggest reason why there's even a discussion about electronic voting is because there's so many questions on the American Ballot. In Canada, the ballot has exactly 1 question on it. With 5 to 8 possible choices for answers. That's it. Very easy for the voter to understand, and very easy for other humans to tally up the responses. When you have so many questions on the ballot, it becomes a lot more enticing to have a computer tally up the responses. So you start to look into things like ScanTron. Once you have computers doing the tally, you start to ask questions like, why not just input your vote into the computer to begin with, instead of writing the vote on paper, and then feeding the paper into a computer to count it.
I'm convinced that with the US system, you could probably cast your vote for president, and then using the remaining questions as signature so that you could be paid for your vote. If there's 16 questions on the ballot, all with a binary answer, then that's 65,000 possibilities. As long as a ballot showed up in the correct polling station with the correct presidential vote and the correct signature, it would basically be proof that you cast your vote for the correct candidate.
I would question whether or not there really are zero consequences from making a claim that something is infringing when it really isn't. Sure, nobody get's disbarred, and nobody get's fined when they make a ridiculous claim of copyright for something that is obviously fair use. But every time they do it, and every time we hear a story about it, it makes us have just that much less sympathy for the companies that are making these claims.
A lot of people will have no problem pirating Sony material after all the stunts they've pulled over the years in the name of protecting against piracy. Metallica has lost a lot of fans over the years because of the negative things they have said publicly about their fans. Many people feel that they are justified in breaking any and every copyright law because of how much it's been abused over the years. People will break laws that they feel are unjust. If you automatically charge people in Australia 30% more for copyrighted materials, for no reason at all, then they're going to find ways around that law.
So, there may not be any direct effects of filing false claims, but there are a lot of secondary effects. They have probably lost way more customers due to the way they are acting than they would have lost had they just let people pirate without doing anything about it.
It's actually kind of nice having a big fat pipe, even if bandwidth caps prevent me from using it at full capacity 24 hours a day. I'm on 30 Mbit/s, and it's nice that I can decide that I want to try out the latest version of Ubuntu and have the DVD image on my machine within 15 minutes. At the same time, I realize that it's not possible for everybody to be using the full speed all the time for the price we are demanding. For the price I pay, I probably couldn't even get 1 Mbit/s if they had to sign a contract guaranteeing that speed. Yet because they don't technically guarantee an speed, I can easily get 20 times that rate 95% of the time.
10 Mbps would actually be pretty acceptable to me for downloading games. Provided they don't have caps, it's pretty reasonable. Even a 50 GB game would take 11.5 hours to download. That may seem like a long time, but if you start your download when you get up in the morning, It will probably be done by the time you are finished you dinner. It's not like you are going to download a 50 GB game every day. Perhaps once a month. I guess some people like to be the first to play a game, and can't wait 12 hours, but the majority of people don't really care too much. I know people who wait for months on games they've already purchased because they're always going over their throughput cap, and can't fit the game into their regular usage cycle.
I suppose they could implement some kind of pre-download 24 hours in advance to make sure everybody had the game ready, and then simply unlock it when the time changes. Sure, there's some chance that somebody could crack the lock, but there isn't really all that much to gain, since it really only means that you get to play the game a few hours ahead of everybody else. Just encrypt the game with a really long key, and then publicly release the key after the game is officially out
I very much agree with this. While proper use of whitespace is important for other programmers when reading the code, it shouldn't be anything that affects how the programming language is interpreted by the computer.
I'm not sure how the fonts list helps. On most of my computers I have the default fonts that come with the operating system. I can't think of the last time I bothered to try and install a new one.
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A certain proportion of the population seems to be unable to control themselves. Whether it be tobacco, sugar, alcohol, fat or some other substance that isn't good for you in large quantities. This is where they make their money. The majority alcohol is bought by heavy drinkers. I would imagine that the same is true for products like Coke. I know some people who drink 6 cans a day of Coke. I'll buy a 12 pack and it will last me a couple months. You aren't going to convince the people who are consuming massive amounts of this stuff to all of a sudden stop consuming it. Maybe a few people will see the light, but a lot of people will never stop. I think the only way is to get people before they start. It's going to take generations of change for the problem to go away.
I for one, am very disappointed that my country isn't on the list.
The way I see it they had an awesome idea and ended up killing their own business by being too greedy. The barber example is perfect. Why not have the same barber sell 20 coupons every month for 2 years instead of selling 400 coupons in a single month, and not be able to fulfill them. The barber would be more able to actually meet the demand, and would be a repeat customer of Groupon, and would probably result in a few more repeat customers for the barber. They pushed businesses to sell more coupons than they could possibly deal with, which resulted in both Groupon and the business looking bad. The majority of stuff I see on Groupon now stuff like online courses that don't really have much in the way of increased costs for the extra business.
Reference for the unfamiliar.
What really cemented my belief that going to Mars is impossible with current technology is this article. The biggest thing to me is just how much supplies you need to sustain yourself for the trip. 3 million pounds worth of supplies. That's 60 shuttle launches worth of supplies. Sure there's rockets that can lift more than the shuttle could, but even with those heavy lifter rockets, you're probably looking at around 30 launches just to get the gear into space. Then there's the problem of being stuck in a tin can for 9-12 months, and still being in good enough shape to do something useful once you get there.
If you want to come back, the minimum stay is 3-4 months while you wait for the planets to line up again. And there is no turn around option like with the Apollo missions. Once you are on your way, there's no way to bail out and come back quickly in the event of an emergency.
The Germans had a similar problem in World War II from what I remember. They built some extremely advanced and expensive tanks, but they couldn't build a lot of them. Along come the Russians with thousands of cheap, light tanks, and they basically run circles around the Germans. The US also had the Liberty Ship which they could build very fast. It didn't matter that the Germans were sinking a lot of ships with their u-boats, because the Americans just deployed more boats than the Germans could deal with.
You pinpointed the reason this will never work. It's too much trouble for the home owner. We can't even get people to recycle and compost in my area, because the people who own the houses would rather just throw everything in a single bin. Having automated pickup is going to cause so many more problems. If the trash doesn't get picked up because the robot didn't like the orientation of the bin, do you have to wait another week for the garbage to get picked up? What happens when you have a little bit more garbage than usual and you can't fit it all in the standard bin?
We actually have the mechanical arms and standardized bins for compost, and they never use them. The guys doing the pickup have figured out it's much easier just to do it by hand. They can get the route done in less time and have more time to enjoy themselves.
This is what happens when you try to make a software update part of a hardware roll-out. They have hardware that they want to ship at a specific date, but haven't had any chance to get the software tested out in a while. They basically had to release iOS 9 even though they knew there was bugs because it was necessary for the new iPad and iPhone models.
The great thing about SD card expansion isn't that I can swap out cards, but rather than I can choose the amount of storage I have available on my phone without paying ridiculous amounts of money for it.
That's the problem with the iPhone. I would have to spend $200 more, totaling $850 to get the 128 GB version. Instead, I could buy an Android or Windows phone with SDXC support for $300, and spend $60 for a 128 GB Micro SD Card. $360 total for the Android or Windows setup, or $850 for the iPhone. That's a $490 difference.
Apple tells you that their internal memory is faster than SD cards, and it may just be, but most people don't need extremely fast speeds when they're just playing movies or music off of it anyway. SD Cards are even fast enough to record 1080p video. So it's not like most people have a use case for faster storage on their phone.
Sure, lots of kids go to university, and lots of them even graduate, but I still don't think a large percentage of those people couldn't invent something new or advance scientific understanding. The Fizz Buzz test is a perfect example of this. Even people who have undergone a lot of training can't come up with a solution to a simple problem that they've never seen before. They are find doing grunt work programming because they aren't encountering problems that they haven't seen before. If they do, they Google it and look for code from someone else who has already solved a similar problem to what they are doing. I've met quite a few "programmers" in my day who were unable to complete even the simplest of tasks, and even with a lot of guidance would fail to solve the simplest of problems.
Updates are the reason that I went with Windows this round over Android. My last Android phone never saw a single update, and was stuck on 2.3 for the 3 years I owned it, even though it was released 6 months before Android 4 came out. Windows Phone seems to be much more likely to get updates than most Android phones. I've already received 1 update on my current phone that I've had for 5 months, so it's already a better track record than my last Android phone. As long as it gets Windows 10 (which it seems it will from what I'm hearing) it will have met my expectations for updates.
I don't mind the fact that Apple sells a 16 GB iPhone. My current Windows Phone is 8 GB. What I do mind is that there's a 16 GB phone without expandable storage. 16 GB would be fine if you could offload the music, movies, and pictures to an SD card. Even if that was all the SD card functioned for on an iPhone, it would be a lot better than the current situation. But the 16 GB of storage for everything that you want on your phone is a huge limitation.
Does it deposit $400 in my back account? Because that's about the price difference between the lowest priced current iPhone and what I spent on my last 2 phones, which were previously Android, and currently Windows. I don't particularly like iOS, and probably wouldn't choose it anyway, but the high price of the devices is what really keeps me away from even considering it. Especially considering that my last 2 phones have been very sufficient in their specifications, and I really don't think I'd have a better experience with my phone if it was 3mm thinner, or had a slightly faster processor.
The other thing I like about Android and Windows is that with the phones I choose, I can use an SD card to expand the storage. This is something that's important to me because even a small amount of media (videos, photos, music) can quickly fill up the 16GB iPhone. For $15 I can get a 32 GB MicroSD, and be able to bring way more stuff with me than I could on an iPhone, for a fraction of the price it would cost to upgrade to an iPhone with a reasonable amount of storage.
Games are big because of the high resolution of the iPad. It has a resolution of 2048Ã--1536. That's higher resolution than any game console does, and higher than the average home desktop monitor. When you have high resolution, you need more pixels in the textures and videos for your games, or they are going to look sub-par.
I think that not having expandable storage at this point hurts them more than it helps them. My wife got an iPad and there was only 12 GB of usable space out of the box. Download a couple movies, add a couple hundred pictures, a few modest sized apps, and the thing is already filled up.
I would question whether people with this usage pattern would just be better off with a cheaper Android or Windows phone. Why pay $700 for a phone if you just you it to send text messages and run few simple apps? If Apple wants to maintain their high end customer base, they should at least have their phones reasonably high end.
I'm not saying it's 1 or 2 people, I'm saying it's a small percentage of the population. When you reach a population of 100 million people, even having 1/1000 people who can think well enough to advance past farming means that you have 100,000 people who can work to complete this goal. Maybe only .01 % of people are smart enough to be rocket scientists and send a rocket to the moon. But that still creates a pool of 20000 rockets scientists just from the US population to allow the Apollo program to be done.
I loved these books, but there's a huge flaw in that explanation. A fraction of infinity is still infinity. If the universe is infinite, then there are by definition infinite planets with life on them. Granted, the population density of the universe still tends towards infinity because there is so much space between planets that support life, but the actual population in an infinite universe would be infinite.
Also, radio transmissions seem like a stop-gap solution. Even in our short technological history, we've gone from using very strong radio signals to send signals very far, to using weaker signals to send signals short distances and transmit data long distances using wires or fiber optics. Perhaps in 100 or 200 years, there will be very few radio signals used to actually transmit data. Or at least not many that would be detectable outside our own atmosphere. Even communication with spacecraft could be done using lasers as opposed to using radio waves.
I would tend to agree. Even within our own human population it seems that only a relatively small number of people have allowed us to advance past the age of agriculture, into the age of electronics and interconnected networks. If the average person was just a little bit dumber, we probably wouldn't be able to sustain the level of technology we currently have. If the average IQ of people was closer to where an IQ of 75 currently is, we'd probably never reach the point where the average person could read, because they would lack the cognitive capacity to do it, or it would take so much training for such a low level of reading, that the effort would be close to useless.
What bothers me about this case is that nobody every seriously thought it was bomb.
This is what most people don't get. Even if you could design a valid system, how do you verify that the terminal you walk up to on election day is actually running the valid software? How do you even determine that it's a valid machine to begin with?
I think the biggest reason why there's even a discussion about electronic voting is because there's so many questions on the American Ballot. In Canada, the ballot has exactly 1 question on it. With 5 to 8 possible choices for answers. That's it. Very easy for the voter to understand, and very easy for other humans to tally up the responses. When you have so many questions on the ballot, it becomes a lot more enticing to have a computer tally up the responses. So you start to look into things like ScanTron. Once you have computers doing the tally, you start to ask questions like, why not just input your vote into the computer to begin with, instead of writing the vote on paper, and then feeding the paper into a computer to count it.
I'm convinced that with the US system, you could probably cast your vote for president, and then using the remaining questions as signature so that you could be paid for your vote. If there's 16 questions on the ballot, all with a binary answer, then that's 65,000 possibilities. As long as a ballot showed up in the correct polling station with the correct presidential vote and the correct signature, it would basically be proof that you cast your vote for the correct candidate.
I would question whether or not there really are zero consequences from making a claim that something is infringing when it really isn't. Sure, nobody get's disbarred, and nobody get's fined when they make a ridiculous claim of copyright for something that is obviously fair use. But every time they do it, and every time we hear a story about it, it makes us have just that much less sympathy for the companies that are making these claims.
A lot of people will have no problem pirating Sony material after all the stunts they've pulled over the years in the name of protecting against piracy. Metallica has lost a lot of fans over the years because of the negative things they have said publicly about their fans. Many people feel that they are justified in breaking any and every copyright law because of how much it's been abused over the years. People will break laws that they feel are unjust. If you automatically charge people in Australia 30% more for copyrighted materials, for no reason at all, then they're going to find ways around that law.
So, there may not be any direct effects of filing false claims, but there are a lot of secondary effects. They have probably lost way more customers due to the way they are acting than they would have lost had they just let people pirate without doing anything about it.
It's actually kind of nice having a big fat pipe, even if bandwidth caps prevent me from using it at full capacity 24 hours a day. I'm on 30 Mbit/s, and it's nice that I can decide that I want to try out the latest version of Ubuntu and have the DVD image on my machine within 15 minutes. At the same time, I realize that it's not possible for everybody to be using the full speed all the time for the price we are demanding. For the price I pay, I probably couldn't even get 1 Mbit/s if they had to sign a contract guaranteeing that speed. Yet because they don't technically guarantee an speed, I can easily get 20 times that rate 95% of the time.
10 Mbps would actually be pretty acceptable to me for downloading games. Provided they don't have caps, it's pretty reasonable. Even a 50 GB game would take 11.5 hours to download. That may seem like a long time, but if you start your download when you get up in the morning, It will probably be done by the time you are finished you dinner. It's not like you are going to download a 50 GB game every day. Perhaps once a month. I guess some people like to be the first to play a game, and can't wait 12 hours, but the majority of people don't really care too much. I know people who wait for months on games they've already purchased because they're always going over their throughput cap, and can't fit the game into their regular usage cycle.
I suppose they could implement some kind of pre-download 24 hours in advance to make sure everybody had the game ready, and then simply unlock it when the time changes. Sure, there's some chance that somebody could crack the lock, but there isn't really all that much to gain, since it really only means that you get to play the game a few hours ahead of everybody else. Just encrypt the game with a really long key, and then publicly release the key after the game is officially out
I very much agree with this. While proper use of whitespace is important for other programmers when reading the code, it shouldn't be anything that affects how the programming language is interpreted by the computer.
I'm not sure how the fonts list helps. On most of my computers I have the default fonts that come with the operating system. I can't think of the last time I bothered to try and install a new one.