ONLY Apple will leave out USB-A while everybody else will include it like they still include VGA which is why just about every projector setup I see still has VGA connections many years after it's demise.
There are millions of USB-A devices being sold now and for years into the future because EVERYBODY except Apple MacBook users will STILL have USB-A connections. USB Toasters, robot claws, mini drones or just quadcopter chargers will all use it.
If they don't patent everything possible, then somebody else does. Then they have to pay somebody else to use their own research! This has already been a problem. Don't forget the grants with deals which give a private party the rights.
Say somebody adds something small onto your work, then charges you to use it and you have nothing to bargain with because you didn't patent anything - so the free loader is then charging you!
Not that long ago we changed patents in the USA so you don't have to be the 1st inventor - it's 1st to file for the patent or something like that... It doesn't help smaller players because filing a patent isn't free and making it stick is more like a legal art form than engineering.
You would be thanking Jobs for 16GB! Probably something along the lines of "at this time we had a choice between waiting another year for Intel or making a hotter, heavier, bigger laptop than the old model and we didn't want to do either because that wouldn't be progress." People would cheer... the 32GB or nothing people would wait instead of trying to find alternatives.
Jobs created Keynote for himself - and named it too. He knew about PROFESSIONALS needing to do presentations. Everywhere I see VGA connections still to this day with some having HDMI connections. Nobody is going to have presentation connections for USB-C for a very long long time.
I can't believe he would have made the MacBook so crippled it can't even connect to a projector without a bigger mess! I've seen students present and how the Windows users struggle and the Mac users do not.
I read that the 16GB is the choice of chips they had and Intel's next version will support 32GB. So maybe that isn't Apple's fault... in which case Phil should have said something better than blaming battery life for that decision. 4-Core Intels don't have a decent GPU this time which is why AMD is utilized more and that would raise the price over their previous dependence upon Intel GPUs (except top model.) Again, they are stuck to Intel's offerings... don't they have any input?
They shouldn't have left the Display Market because somebody needs to "innovate" with a eGPU case integrated with a display. Just selling an eGPU would have helped.
I've read bits quoted from the actual emails. I am sure if there were really horrible stuff that would be the parts quoted and discussed. Besides one can search for a match to make sure a quote is real. I've heard people blabbing lies where they don't even bother to show the quotation they are supposedly basing their accusations on.
Political theater is the game. You know it's theater when it never even ENTERS a court room. No, it's not because of corruption; because some court somewhere will take up a legit case (or even a bad case.) It has to be pretty hollow to not have somebody take up a case with merit. Sure that is not an absolute rule, but it is not so common or simple to prevent and it's a far greater metric than listening to the hundreds of idiot pundits all over the media.
Bill Clinton had a fraudulent case brought against him which was dismissed as fraudulent in the end but at least it sounded good enough for years to keep it going long enough to tie in Lewinsky and get him impeached.
Lithium batteries suck in the cold. Just try out powertools in the winter. NiCad is preferable for outside work lasting a while.
I would guess it is likely cheaper to heat the garage you charge your electric car in than let the car's battery management electrically heat the battery pack. (They have heaters because your car would lose range just from sitting while you have the car parked somewhere.) I have not yet read about somebody finding out the details -- likely because the electric heater is nothing compared to the recharging of the car so nobody seems to care to figure it out.
Most people I know in MN do not have a heated garage-- but maybe 1/3 of them have an attached garage which is always warmer than the outside by a bit.
What I wonder is-- is the Powerwall safe to put into the house? (should be since attached garages are part of the house and lithium fires must have been considered... does the insurance company up your fire insurance risk?? Probably not because mine told me I couldn't get a discount for not having any Gas service.)
MN gets about as much solar as Germany. That means the payback will take a while, mostly because electricity is quite cheap in MN vs Germany. Solar gardens are beginning to form in MN already but Xcel is jerking them around.
3M glass coatings can turn ordinary windows into almost bullet proof windows. See the youtube demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Musk is using 3M glass coatings. The PV cells likely will not break from hail but the glass may crack up. Future refined 3M coatings will perform even better than this application of their existing tech. The coatings go on the inside of the glass from my understanding so these tiles will last for decades - without cracks expect them to go a century and I'd figure the cells would still output (at maybe 50%. I've read about 1970s PV performing at 70%.) Also, a high roof angle helps deflect impacts; evacuated solar tubes are glass and I hear they handle hail just fine.
SNOW is an issue in MN; however, have you seen smooth steel roofing up in northern MN? It is quite often free of snow cover and it wouldn't be too difficult to clear it off. My parent's cabin had a brown steel roof and it almost always was warm enough from the sun to encourage the snow to slide right off. With the proper solar slope (45deg) that is probably steep enough. Furthermore, these are dark blue silicon cells with a glass cover. They will get warm from the sun; like a green house and since MOST solar energy is lost by reflection or as IR heat... the more that is trapped the better. Heavy snow falls will likely require some work but light snows and ice will not be an issue. People in MN should know what a snow rake is already. Small labor price to pay -- and again, it won't be as often as you think.
I bet 99% of the staff can't figure out how to plug in a flash drive into a MacBook... The new pro models have 3 ports open of the wrong type but the MacBook would be charging on it's only port.
Everything I read about the emails from decent sources indicates this is all a bunch of hype. It's not any worse than most the other politicians and it is certainly not as bad as what Trump gets away with. His tax fraud won't put him in jail either but it sure would do any of us in. The last few secretaries of state did the same sort of stuff and they won't be caught -- or even investigated enough to find similar things. Only 1 person gets investigated for decades with millions of $$$ like this. I'd rather just pick somebody else; however, nobody else has survived this level of propagandized attack. None of it ever goes to trial, that says something... especially when there is often enough biased people involved to get it to trial. It's always political theater and never really gets serious. So I'm not going give it much attention.
I especially didn't like how old info was re-classified after the fact and then turned into a huge scandal because she had emails that were retroactively classified.
I realize Trump is a republican middle finger to the system but I'd prefer not to pick an African style "president" as the means to do that.
Look at the take apart photos. The circuit board has NO MORE ROOM. Last I looked (not recently) the 32GB modules have more ICs than the 16GB. I wouldn't be surprised if Phil was confused and misinterpreted something and turned a SIZE constraint which took away battery space into a power usage constraint.
It makes far more sense as a SIZE problem than just replacing some ICs with expensive ICs. Now if those ICs existed at the time of development then I'm wrong and Apple has their heads up their asses. They couldn't put in 1 normal USB port.... I'm currently looking at alternatives because of this. I get USB flash sticks all the time without warning and I do not want to carry an adapter around all the time.
The last year GPU is disappointing but the lower heat output would make sense and I can tolerate that... I was thinking of ditching the GPU anyhow because an external GPU on thunderbolt 2 runs about 80%-90% of full speed (easily beating a laptop GPU) so version 3's speed should get close desktop performance.
There are solar panels which produce power (70%?) that were made in the 1970s. So you may pay upfront costs of 10 years worth of power but you get DECADES of power after that point. Then it's basically free. Just being simplistic that is a good deal if you have the money and it's a great loan situation too. We all know that utility rates will go up over the next 10 years.
Storage is the big problem and expense we need to be investing in solutions for. So maybe then we end up with 30 years upfront costs... then it becomes a bigger loan situation. Obviously this is impossible because we never had to factor in our energy costs into trying to afford the biggest most bloated house we can afford.
What is NEW here is not that they could collect that metadata or that they let government benefit from it. What is new that this time it is a BUSINESS plan, a service for sale where they do the government's work for them and then sell the results to whomever they can find to sell the service to.
Assuming they follow the law (like anybody would go to jail) do we even have any laws that would apply to a private corporation data mining their customers and then selling the analysis?
REMEMBER after Snowden when the government said they'd change practices of spying on everybody? Remember how they said they'd work with businesses to have them do more instead of just hand over complete access thru a backdoor? This sure seems like the result of those changes to me! So instead of bright NSA contractors data mining our lives we outsourced it to the companies (plus probably still have back doors we will not know about until the next Snowden type risks his life.)
In the USA they can hire or fire for ANY reason. They just can't state all the reasons because some are illegal.
If you did try to plug this hole it would fix the fact they can quietly do whatever they want... then you have the workforce you could point to like they do with racial and gender discrimination and attempt to counter them circumventing the law which makes it more difficult for HR to get past those laws. Naturally, the lawyer politicians leave most of the enforcement up to civil courts to add to our sue crazy society.
Just how are we going to say an employer discriminates based on DNA?? Even in the existing mess we have today, you have to sue and collect gender or race statistics of all employees as part of discovery and that information is public. How does a legal case discover the private DNA info of all the employees? Does the employer then have to collect DNA just so they can fend off future lawsuits??
The only solution is a complete revamp of the HR process which requires OUTSOURCING of this huge aspect of HR. Some nations involve the government heavily in the process and it works pretty well and solves many issues while introducing some others. This would likely go beyond what those governments already do today. Many issues involved in that one... sure you could go to NGOs but those lack even a fraction of public input that government has -- even when it's moderately corrupt it's better than most NGOs. Then you have competing HR services which add more problems than they likely solve. At least in the mess we have today it's less dangerous... for now... remember, the USA just recently solved the HUUUGE problem with preexisting conditions in health insurance (and not without creating new issues.)
It is nice to see a publicly traded corporation actually doing LONG TERM PLANNING. This will save Target money long term and provide good PR in the short term. I would think most retail stores use less power than their roof collects... I wonder how they deal with all that extra power when many places have a whole different set of grid-tie regulations when your output exceeds just a few MW. In my area you dare not exceed 3 MW because then you must become a power company.
Whenever a corporation goes public it is just a matter of time before they become evil, or more evil than they were. Short termed thinking of shareholders and their similar minded funds are what cause the bean counters to take over control from the competent management and engineers and founders which made the corporation succeed in the first place (except in those cases where they go public just to get more suckers to invest.)
A) You can place the burden of proof on the public and decades of evidence proving something is unhealthy. Naturally, there will be corporate influence undermining progress like big tobacco which delayed progress for at least 20 years if not 30. OR B) You can place the burden of proof on the industry and government to show evidence something is NOT harmful.
New tech now with unknown harm to millions or delayed tech with less harm. It is your government decides which path to go down.
What about the SMALL ARTIST? They create songs and the bigger players/studios can just copy the tune -- in fact it is extremely easy for movies, TV, and anybody else to copy the tune or simply a part of the tune.
So... copyright exists so the kids of some dead artist can sue some other artist because a few seconds of similarity between songs.
It's about time a judge finally learned something. Any honest CS or linguist has been saying for decades that software is a language. You can't patent a plot device but that is what we are doing.... along with owning biological discoveries. Claiming that progress wouldn't happen, completely forgetting how much better it was before we became crippled in restrictions, added costs and lawsuits.
HTML 5.0 draft (before W3C got into their stupid versioning) contained some of your request already.
1-2) ISO date format needs to be forced upon everybody. like the metric system. However, the spec doesn't require the browser display with it. Browsers are free to display the date in a localized format while submitting the proper ISO format. This wouldn't be much different than how Options display different values. Perhaps the spec should mention this so nobody fears doing this...
3) HTML5 is good enough already; doubt you'll get them going further anytime soon. I can imagine from my experience with them that is how it'll go. I agree with you that it would be convenient.
5) Initially, integer didn't suggest a incremental button (that I recall) but later the spec showed an example. The problem with presenting suggestions or screenshots of implementations is that every literal minded developer will copy it. The CSS groups are slow as hell and not in sync with HTML5 like it should be; could be how they create lots of tiny CSS working groups with narrow focuses and that doesn't respond to HTML5's requirements well enough yet. HTML5 tries to define appearances in CSS but that becomes a chicken/egg problem. Turning on the incremental buttons needs to be CSS... a slider presentation would also make sense (there is a big bias towards minimalism. Yet METER is creating quite the CSS challenge for them... which will be much more complex if they just begin to address all the requests out there for it.)
6) Would be nice; however almost everything has either 2 decimals or 0. Just a few have 3. So an integer with step=0.01 would work well enough. Don't expect that to happen. Currency conversion or selection won't happen; that is too complex - you implement it. It would need to know what currencies you support so then you are somehow using a bunch of option tags or creating some odd list attribute.
7) Country selector would also be nice. possible issues are related to constantly changing flags and countries in less stable places. If you implement it then you are in charge of handling those situations. You can do a Select with country flags already before HTML5.
8) Credit cards - update related issues long term. similar issues as country listings but worse. Perhaps you can gain traction with the working group if you team up with a browser and aim towards CHIP and RFID support --- maybe we could finally get an encryption input !! It's not a new issue and they never handled the 2-way communication that is involved with an encryption input. (nobody even touches the cert authentication features in the browsers already except http://startssl.com/
9) HTML5. has it. no validation possible. But it SHOULD use the proper keypad on a phone. I investigated this; it's crazy to go global with it which is why it was left open. Implementing is way too much work. With VOIP it seems that it would be pointless long term because any kind of phone number could be used anywhere; restricting this will become an issue in addition to keeping up with global changes in format. The only standard is the international prefix... except I found a few places where that didn't even apply within their country.
10) HTML5 did it already. Has the best RegEx for email too- it's in the spec. check it out!
11) HTML5 doesn't handle editors; however W3C is trying to standardize kludges. the groundwork on roles helps slightly but yes, it's all kludges. There are so many options on this one that it is highly unlikely to standardize. They really don't like taking something with a million options and standardizing on 1 simple solution.
12-14) Yes, that would be nice. However they have added groundwork to make that much easier for you to do in HTML5. drag-n-drop files; local file access; AJAX file upload. The old "accept" attribute does work even though it's use is optional.
15) never. same as 11. but 11, 12-14 related features make it easier to implement (because
Fees would have to rise and people really were upset at changes Netflix made in pricing before. They are trying to do as much as possible with the funds that they have.
If copyright was SANE there would be a HUGE library of old programming available. If all the old junk isn't preserved, it would clearly be better content than the modern programming... (which is mostly junk.)
The simple answer is that Netflix benefited by being the 1st. Today every major content owner can create their own service or make exclusive deals from an ever growing list of distributors desperate for content. This is almost EXACTLY like cable/sat channels which is why it has morphed into that direction. The HBO model works best which is why so many channels try to create compelling content of their own before they lose their budgets and become a poor rerun only channel who has to play infomercials all night.
The USA has massive corporate welfare scheme which pays for risk taking (bankruptcy being a little known one.) This unnoticed part of the welfare system costs more than most other programs (S.S. and Medicare are never included in a fair minded analysis; those are directly funded separately; purposely isolated from everything else.)
The USA does not do much of anything today except higher end design work; where they still pay quite well globally and brings in people.
Massive research/education system the USA has is often overlooked because corporations successfully get credit for "innovations" that are largely the work of others. You might hear about some MIT invention because of their great PR but 5 years down the line when it ends up in some product you most likely do not make the connection (plus the company will patent their implementation of it.)
Finally, the USA used to have an education system which promoted free thinking and creative thinking. Today other nations use the research and past experience to improve their education systems while the USA models 3rd world failures in their system - if it were not for cultural and institutional momentum it would be so much worse. Part of this is ignorant ideology which drives both parties too much; the other is the GOP plan to purposely foobar public education (I've heard this from a top party official) so long term privatization can finally get enough public support (so this scheme is also ideological.) What amazes me is how arrogant they can think decades of failure can be made up for by our inherent superiority to the world. The rest the world progresses while we go backwards; in the end, every well run system will be very similar and "competing" within slim margins that are meaningless.
I am not a lawyer but The Yes Men comes to mind. I remember stories of reporters posing for things as well.
I think it is rather clear it is not a crime because they are suing and there is no mention of criminal charges. They may find some civil regulation but it sounds to me more like retaliation where the lawsuit itself and the bad PR is the goal; maybe some money is settled or somebody resigns because of the bad PR.
I knew somebody who was frivolously sued by a multinational - he would have won if he didn't go bankrupt during the years of litigation; so he settled, they won and his lawyer won.
The problem is the corporation doesn't scale that well and when huge in size serious problems surface.
In previous generations some management felt responsible for their employee's jobs. This still tends to happen in small biz because they actually know the employees; while in larger corporations they do not-- it resembles conditions similar to the Milgram Experiment and other unpleasant discoveries about human nature... (like the Stanford Prison Experiment) plus just having abstractions amplify tiny flaws into bigger problems (see the work of Dan Ariely.)
Corporate law in the USA defines corps as for their shareholders and nothing else; it's optional for management to IGNORE the legal definition and be human. Easier to do as one gets removed further from this kind of society's top interest: employment.
Society will clash with our current system's warped values and it won't be tolerated anymore. Change will happen somehow. A.I. will force the matter as our economic system drives away all the jobs due to it being built around values society only allowed for the sake of jobs in the first place.
No label covers it better than the modern "corporation". Which includes non-profit corporations and anything else government chooses to define in detail... and it is defined way beyond simply an investment shield.
From a broader, society perspective:
Hunter/Gatherer societies had no need for jobs. The food supply was your "employer" and supported your survival. There was a tendency to worship the provider, which was nature so they strongly trend to pagan.
Money based societies all depend upon jobs. The employers supply your job to get money so you can survive. There is a tendency to worship the provider; which here are the "job creators" and so on.
Society's perspective is always about survival, so the purpose of corporation is to be "job creators" and what the business produces is secondary. Even the most business biased preach "job creators" and rain dance or virgin sacrifices etc. The "invisible hand of the market" alludes to god (not original intent) like nature does for the hunter society... leave nature alone to play out so we can benefit from being a part of it... this doesn't work in an artificial man-made unbalanced system but I'll not prod the libertarians any further... anyhow, there are similarities between drastically different economic systems.
Economy: look at the purposeless crap that is produced as well as the frivolous services and how the post WW2 / post depression engineering of the consumer society we have today. We force CREATE demand in order to provide enough jobs so too many people don't starve and bring the whole system down. What we all really need and want is job creation (survival in this society which means reasonably keeping up with the neighbors) most people don't really care about the economy. A.I. will bring a lot of aspects out that weren't being considered by the masses before.
Corporate law has changed over time and not for the better. Corporations are defined by law; therefore they exist by regulation which owes all it's force to the power of governments (external governments included.)
The corporate board used to not be easily stacked with friends of the CEO... and that was historically the case. Also, it was less likely that a small population of buddies were on boards of each other's corporation in the past, which is a huge conflict of interest. Changing that would be new; however, modern times created a problem which needs to be addressed. People forget the problems of government power/corruption are human organization problems which exist in every organization.
Some nations such as Germany require by corporate law that boards have a significant portion of the board be WORKERS or their union. This makes so much sense it is hard to understand why it isn't mentioned in the USA.
The intended purpose of a corporation is to provide gainful employment; however, legally we define it as solely looking out for the share holders. That can be altered; in the past, there was a moral aspect in society which to some degree infected management. Ethics essentially has been removed from the culture and what remains is removed in MBA school.
The balance of powers within government systems has to be extended to everything within their grasp otherwise the loopholes will allow for the creation of monsters beyond the power of the system and will corrupt and hijack the government which defines/regulates them. It's like an unchecked disease becoming an epidemic and then killing off everybody at the CDC. That is where we are today...
USB 3 has DMA support doesn't it? Everything is getting DMA; HDMI and everything else will have it. All you'll be able to count on is enforced memory restrictions as far as device access. Which still leaves one open to devices messing with each other's DMA.
Firewire has had restrictions for a long time now; depending on hardware and OS support-- I think for about a decade.
The BIG concern should be the cheap hardware out there-- electrical USB-C problems and the crap connectors.... and the never ending list of new connectors which do almost the same thing we have to adapt etc. because somebody has to save a mm or a penny.
Wikileaks can leak documents from US government on other countries...and they have; it is just not intentional (yet) on the part of the US. As far as a bias... the US waging a cold war on Wikileaks does foster resentment...
US elections now involve BILLIONS of dollars in propaganda spending; a great deal of that spending goes to media outlets. Surely you must notice how the "news" of organizations is skewed by their advertisers?
Remember when email viruses were a big thing in the 90s because of Outlook and the media never said Microsoft during their reports? MS advertising did that. I knew a news director, he said how it really works... Or how about how ADM, Monsanto, and other corporations with zero customers will pay huge amounts to advertise on networks with an investigative news capacity? PBS Frontline has probably brought in more corporate donations than any other PBS show.
Remember WMD in Iraq? Cheney planted lies in the NY Times and then cited them in the rush to war. That didn't even cost $ to use NY Times.
Foreign corporations are buying influence in US elections more than ever before (and multinationals who are considered based in the USA should be considered just as bad.) The big bad Russians are a tiny problem; best used as a scapegoat for anybody who wants to play dirty - plus it helps politicians looking for an enemy as they ramp up for another war to save the collapsing American "Empire" card house.
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ONLY Apple will leave out USB-A while everybody else will include it like they still include VGA which is why just about every projector setup I see still has VGA connections many years after it's demise.
There are millions of USB-A devices being sold now and for years into the future because EVERYBODY except Apple MacBook users will STILL have USB-A connections. USB Toasters, robot claws, mini drones or just quadcopter chargers will all use it.
If they don't patent everything possible, then somebody else does. Then they have to pay somebody else to use their own research! This has already been a problem. Don't forget the grants with deals which give a private party the rights.
Say somebody adds something small onto your work, then charges you to use it and you have nothing to bargain with because you didn't patent anything - so the free loader is then charging you!
Not that long ago we changed patents in the USA so you don't have to be the 1st inventor - it's 1st to file for the patent or something like that... It doesn't help smaller players because filing a patent isn't free and making it stick is more like a legal art form than engineering.
You would be thanking Jobs for 16GB! Probably something along the lines of "at this time we had a choice between waiting another year for Intel or making a hotter, heavier, bigger laptop than the old model and we didn't want to do either because that wouldn't be progress." People would cheer... the 32GB or nothing people would wait instead of trying to find alternatives.
Jobs created Keynote for himself - and named it too. He knew about PROFESSIONALS needing to do presentations. Everywhere I see VGA connections still to this day with some having HDMI connections. Nobody is going to have presentation connections for USB-C for a very long long time.
I can't believe he would have made the MacBook so crippled it can't even connect to a projector without a bigger mess! I've seen students present and how the Windows users struggle and the Mac users do not.
I read that the 16GB is the choice of chips they had and Intel's next version will support 32GB. So maybe that isn't Apple's fault... in which case Phil should have said something better than blaming battery life for that decision. 4-Core Intels don't have a decent GPU this time which is why AMD is utilized more and that would raise the price over their previous dependence upon Intel GPUs (except top model.) Again, they are stuck to Intel's offerings... don't they have any input?
They shouldn't have left the Display Market because somebody needs to "innovate" with a eGPU case integrated with a display. Just selling an eGPU would have helped.
I've read bits quoted from the actual emails. I am sure if there were really horrible stuff that would be the parts quoted and discussed. Besides one can search for a match to make sure a quote is real. I've heard people blabbing lies where they don't even bother to show the quotation they are supposedly basing their accusations on.
Political theater is the game. You know it's theater when it never even ENTERS a court room. No, it's not because of corruption; because some court somewhere will take up a legit case (or even a bad case.) It has to be pretty hollow to not have somebody take up a case with merit. Sure that is not an absolute rule, but it is not so common or simple to prevent and it's a far greater metric than listening to the hundreds of idiot pundits all over the media.
Bill Clinton had a fraudulent case brought against him which was dismissed as fraudulent in the end but at least it sounded good enough for years to keep it going long enough to tie in Lewinsky and get him impeached.
Lithium batteries suck in the cold. Just try out powertools in the winter. NiCad is preferable for outside work lasting a while.
I would guess it is likely cheaper to heat the garage you charge your electric car in than let the car's battery management electrically heat the battery pack. (They have heaters because your car would lose range just from sitting while you have the car parked somewhere.) I have not yet read about somebody finding out the details -- likely because the electric heater is nothing compared to the recharging of the car so nobody seems to care to figure it out.
Most people I know in MN do not have a heated garage-- but maybe 1/3 of them have an attached garage which is always warmer than the outside by a bit.
What I wonder is-- is the Powerwall safe to put into the house? (should be since attached garages are part of the house and lithium fires must have been considered... does the insurance company up your fire insurance risk?? Probably not because mine told me I couldn't get a discount for not having any Gas service.)
MN gets about as much solar as Germany. That means the payback will take a while, mostly because electricity is quite cheap in MN vs Germany. Solar gardens are beginning to form in MN already but Xcel is jerking them around.
3M glass coatings can turn ordinary windows into almost bullet proof windows. See the youtube demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Musk is using 3M glass coatings. The PV cells likely will not break from hail but the glass may crack up. Future refined 3M coatings will perform even better than this application of their existing tech. The coatings go on the inside of the glass from my understanding so these tiles will last for decades - without cracks expect them to go a century and I'd figure the cells would still output (at maybe 50%. I've read about 1970s PV performing at 70%.) Also, a high roof angle helps deflect impacts; evacuated solar tubes are glass and I hear they handle hail just fine.
SNOW is an issue in MN; however, have you seen smooth steel roofing up in northern MN? It is quite often free of snow cover and it wouldn't be too difficult to clear it off. My parent's cabin had a brown steel roof and it almost always was warm enough from the sun to encourage the snow to slide right off. With the proper solar slope (45deg) that is probably steep enough. Furthermore, these are dark blue silicon cells with a glass cover. They will get warm from the sun; like a green house and since MOST solar energy is lost by reflection or as IR heat... the more that is trapped the better. Heavy snow falls will likely require some work but light snows and ice will not be an issue. People in MN should know what a snow rake is already. Small labor price to pay -- and again, it won't be as often as you think.
I bet 99% of the staff can't figure out how to plug in a flash drive into a MacBook... The new pro models have 3 ports open of the wrong type but the MacBook would be charging on it's only port.
Everything I read about the emails from decent sources indicates this is all a bunch of hype. It's not any worse than most the other politicians and it is certainly not as bad as what Trump gets away with. His tax fraud won't put him in jail either but it sure would do any of us in. The last few secretaries of state did the same sort of stuff and they won't be caught -- or even investigated enough to find similar things. Only 1 person gets investigated for decades with millions of $$$ like this. I'd rather just pick somebody else; however, nobody else has survived this level of propagandized attack. None of it ever goes to trial, that says something... especially when there is often enough biased people involved to get it to trial. It's always political theater and never really gets serious. So I'm not going give it much attention.
I especially didn't like how old info was re-classified after the fact and then turned into a huge scandal because she had emails that were retroactively classified.
I realize Trump is a republican middle finger to the system but I'd prefer not to pick an African style "president" as the means to do that.
Look at the take apart photos. The circuit board has NO MORE ROOM. Last I looked (not recently) the 32GB modules have more ICs than the 16GB. I wouldn't be surprised if Phil was confused and misinterpreted something and turned a SIZE constraint which took away battery space into a power usage constraint.
It makes far more sense as a SIZE problem than just replacing some ICs with expensive ICs. Now if those ICs existed at the time of development then I'm wrong and Apple has their heads up their asses. They couldn't put in 1 normal USB port.... I'm currently looking at alternatives because of this. I get USB flash sticks all the time without warning and I do not want to carry an adapter around all the time.
The last year GPU is disappointing but the lower heat output would make sense and I can tolerate that... I was thinking of ditching the GPU anyhow because an external GPU on thunderbolt 2 runs about 80%-90% of full speed (easily beating a laptop GPU) so version 3's speed should get close desktop performance.
There are solar panels which produce power (70%?) that were made in the 1970s. So you may pay upfront costs of 10 years worth of power but you get DECADES of power after that point. Then it's basically free. Just being simplistic that is a good deal if you have the money and it's a great loan situation too. We all know that utility rates will go up over the next 10 years.
Storage is the big problem and expense we need to be investing in solutions for. So maybe then we end up with 30 years upfront costs... then it becomes a bigger loan situation. Obviously this is impossible because we never had to factor in our energy costs into trying to afford the biggest most bloated house we can afford.
What is NEW here is not that they could collect that metadata or that they let government benefit from it. What is new that this time it is a BUSINESS plan, a service for sale where they do the government's work for them and then sell the results to whomever they can find to sell the service to.
Assuming they follow the law (like anybody would go to jail) do we even have any laws that would apply to a private corporation data mining their customers and then selling the analysis?
REMEMBER after Snowden when the government said they'd change practices of spying on everybody? Remember how they said they'd work with businesses to have them do more instead of just hand over complete access thru a backdoor? This sure seems like the result of those changes to me! So instead of bright NSA contractors data mining our lives we outsourced it to the companies (plus probably still have back doors we will not know about until the next Snowden type risks his life.)
In the USA they can hire or fire for ANY reason. They just can't state all the reasons because some are illegal.
If you did try to plug this hole it would fix the fact they can quietly do whatever they want... then you have the workforce you could point to like they do with racial and gender discrimination and attempt to counter them circumventing the law which makes it more difficult for HR to get past those laws. Naturally, the lawyer politicians leave most of the enforcement up to civil courts to add to our sue crazy society.
Just how are we going to say an employer discriminates based on DNA?? Even in the existing mess we have today, you have to sue and collect gender or race statistics of all employees as part of discovery and that information is public. How does a legal case discover the private DNA info of all the employees? Does the employer then have to collect DNA just so they can fend off future lawsuits??
The only solution is a complete revamp of the HR process which requires OUTSOURCING of this huge aspect of HR. Some nations involve the government heavily in the process and it works pretty well and solves many issues while introducing some others. This would likely go beyond what those governments already do today. Many issues involved in that one... sure you could go to NGOs but those lack even a fraction of public input that government has -- even when it's moderately corrupt it's better than most NGOs. Then you have competing HR services which add more problems than they likely solve. At least in the mess we have today it's less dangerous... for now... remember, the USA just recently solved the HUUUGE problem with preexisting conditions in health insurance (and not without creating new issues.)
It is nice to see a publicly traded corporation actually doing LONG TERM PLANNING. This will save Target money long term and provide good PR in the short term. I would think most retail stores use less power than their roof collects... I wonder how they deal with all that extra power when many places have a whole different set of grid-tie regulations when your output exceeds just a few MW. In my area you dare not exceed 3 MW because then you must become a power company.
Whenever a corporation goes public it is just a matter of time before they become evil, or more evil than they were. Short termed thinking of shareholders and their similar minded funds are what cause the bean counters to take over control from the competent management and engineers and founders which made the corporation succeed in the first place (except in those cases where they go public just to get more suckers to invest.)
A) You can place the burden of proof on the public and decades of evidence proving something is unhealthy. Naturally, there will be corporate influence undermining progress like big tobacco which delayed progress for at least 20 years if not 30.
OR
B) You can place the burden of proof on the industry and government to show evidence something is NOT harmful.
New tech now with unknown harm to millions or delayed tech with less harm. It is your government decides which path to go down.
What about the SMALL ARTIST? They create songs and the bigger players/studios can just copy the tune -- in fact it is extremely easy for movies, TV, and anybody else to copy the tune or simply a part of the tune.
So... copyright exists so the kids of some dead artist can sue some other artist because a few seconds of similarity between songs.
It's about time a judge finally learned something. Any honest CS or linguist has been saying for decades that software is a language. You can't patent a plot device but that is what we are doing.... along with owning biological discoveries. Claiming that progress wouldn't happen, completely forgetting how much better it was before we became crippled in restrictions, added costs and lawsuits.
HTML 5.0 draft (before W3C got into their stupid versioning) contained some of your request already.
1-2) ISO date format needs to be forced upon everybody. like the metric system. However, the spec doesn't require the browser display with it. Browsers are free to display the date in a localized format while submitting the proper ISO format. This wouldn't be much different than how Options display different values. Perhaps the spec should mention this so nobody fears doing this...
3) HTML5 is good enough already; doubt you'll get them going further anytime soon. I can imagine from my experience with them that is how it'll go. I agree with you that it would be convenient.
5) Initially, integer didn't suggest a incremental button (that I recall) but later the spec showed an example. The problem with presenting suggestions or screenshots of implementations is that every literal minded developer will copy it. The CSS groups are slow as hell and not in sync with HTML5 like it should be; could be how they create lots of tiny CSS working groups with narrow focuses and that doesn't respond to HTML5's requirements well enough yet. HTML5 tries to define appearances in CSS but that becomes a chicken/egg problem. Turning on the incremental buttons needs to be CSS... a slider presentation would also make sense (there is a big bias towards minimalism. Yet METER is creating quite the CSS challenge for them... which will be much more complex if they just begin to address all the requests out there for it.)
6) Would be nice; however almost everything has either 2 decimals or 0. Just a few have 3. So an integer with step=0.01 would work well enough. Don't expect that to happen. Currency conversion or selection won't happen; that is too complex - you implement it. It would need to know what currencies you support so then you are somehow using a bunch of option tags or creating some odd list attribute.
7) Country selector would also be nice. possible issues are related to constantly changing flags and countries in less stable places. If you implement it then you are in charge of handling those situations. You can do a Select with country flags already before HTML5.
8) Credit cards - update related issues long term. similar issues as country listings but worse. Perhaps you can gain traction with the working group if you team up with a browser and aim towards CHIP and RFID support --- maybe we could finally get an encryption input !! It's not a new issue and they never handled the 2-way communication that is involved with an encryption input. (nobody even touches the cert authentication features in the browsers already except http://startssl.com/
9) HTML5. has it. no validation possible. But it SHOULD use the proper keypad on a phone. I investigated this; it's crazy to go global with it which is why it was left open. Implementing is way too much work. With VOIP it seems that it would be pointless long term because any kind of phone number could be used anywhere; restricting this will become an issue in addition to keeping up with global changes in format. The only standard is the international prefix... except I found a few places where that didn't even apply within their country.
10) HTML5 did it already. Has the best RegEx for email too- it's in the spec. check it out!
11) HTML5 doesn't handle editors; however W3C is trying to standardize kludges. the groundwork on roles helps slightly but yes, it's all kludges. There are so many options on this one that it is highly unlikely to standardize. They really don't like taking something with a million options and standardizing on 1 simple solution.
12-14) Yes, that would be nice. However they have added groundwork to make that much easier for you to do in HTML5. drag-n-drop files; local file access; AJAX file upload. The old "accept" attribute does work even though it's use is optional.
15) never. same as 11. but 11, 12-14 related features make it easier to implement (because
Fees would have to rise and people really were upset at changes Netflix made in pricing before. They are trying to do as much as possible with the funds that they have.
If copyright was SANE there would be a HUGE library of old programming available. If all the old junk isn't preserved, it would clearly be better content than the modern programming... (which is mostly junk.)
The simple answer is that Netflix benefited by being the 1st. Today every major content owner can create their own service or make exclusive deals from an ever growing list of distributors desperate for content. This is almost EXACTLY like cable/sat channels which is why it has morphed into that direction. The HBO model works best which is why so many channels try to create compelling content of their own before they lose their budgets and become a poor rerun only channel who has to play infomercials all night.
The USA is where the most funding exists.
The USA has massive corporate welfare scheme which pays for risk taking (bankruptcy being a little known one.) This unnoticed part of the welfare system costs more than most other programs (S.S. and Medicare are never included in a fair minded analysis; those are directly funded separately; purposely isolated from everything else.)
The USA does not do much of anything today except higher end design work; where they still pay quite well globally and brings in people.
Massive research/education system the USA has is often overlooked because corporations successfully get credit for "innovations" that are largely the work of others. You might hear about some MIT invention because of their great PR but 5 years down the line when it ends up in some product you most likely do not make the connection (plus the company will patent their implementation of it.)
Finally, the USA used to have an education system which promoted free thinking and creative thinking. Today other nations use the research and past experience to improve their education systems while the USA models 3rd world failures in their system - if it were not for cultural and institutional momentum it would be so much worse. Part of this is ignorant ideology which drives both parties too much; the other is the GOP plan to purposely foobar public education (I've heard this from a top party official) so long term privatization can finally get enough public support (so this scheme is also ideological.) What amazes me is how arrogant they can think decades of failure can be made up for by our inherent superiority to the world. The rest the world progresses while we go backwards; in the end, every well run system will be very similar and "competing" within slim margins that are meaningless.
I think it is rather clear it is not a crime because they are suing and there is no mention of criminal charges. They may find some civil regulation but it sounds to me more like retaliation where the lawsuit itself and the bad PR is the goal; maybe some money is settled or somebody resigns because of the bad PR.
I knew somebody who was frivolously sued by a multinational - he would have won if he didn't go bankrupt during the years of litigation; so he settled, they won and his lawyer won.
The problem is the corporation doesn't scale that well and when huge in size serious problems surface.
In previous generations some management felt responsible for their employee's jobs. This still tends to happen in small biz because they actually know the employees; while in larger corporations they do not-- it resembles conditions similar to the Milgram Experiment and other unpleasant discoveries about human nature... (like the Stanford Prison Experiment) plus just having abstractions amplify tiny flaws into bigger problems (see the work of Dan Ariely.)
Corporate law in the USA defines corps as for their shareholders and nothing else; it's optional for management to IGNORE the legal definition and be human. Easier to do as one gets removed further from this kind of society's top interest: employment.
Society will clash with our current system's warped values and it won't be tolerated anymore. Change will happen somehow. A.I. will force the matter as our economic system drives away all the jobs due to it being built around values society only allowed for the sake of jobs in the first place.
No label covers it better than the modern "corporation". Which includes non-profit corporations and anything else government chooses to define in detail... and it is defined way beyond simply an investment shield.
From a broader, society perspective:
Hunter/Gatherer societies had no need for jobs. The food supply was your "employer" and supported your survival.
There was a tendency to worship the provider, which was nature so they strongly trend to pagan.
Money based societies all depend upon jobs. The employers supply your job to get money so you can survive. There is a tendency to worship the provider; which here are the "job creators" and so on.
Society's perspective is always about survival, so the purpose of corporation is to be "job creators" and what the business produces is secondary. Even the most business biased preach "job creators" and rain dance or virgin sacrifices etc. The "invisible hand of the market" alludes to god (not original intent) like nature does for the hunter society... leave nature alone to play out so we can benefit from being a part of it... this doesn't work in an artificial man-made unbalanced system but I'll not prod the libertarians any further... anyhow, there are similarities between drastically different economic systems.
Economy: look at the purposeless crap that is produced as well as the frivolous services and how the post WW2 / post depression engineering of the consumer society we have today. We force CREATE demand in order to provide enough jobs so too many people don't starve and bring the whole system down. What we all really need and want is job creation (survival in this society which means reasonably keeping up with the neighbors) most people don't really care about the economy. A.I. will bring a lot of aspects out that weren't being considered by the masses before.
Corporate law has changed over time and not for the better. Corporations are defined by law; therefore they exist by regulation which owes all it's force to the power of governments (external governments included.)
The corporate board used to not be easily stacked with friends of the CEO... and that was historically the case. Also, it was less likely that a small population of buddies were on boards of each other's corporation in the past, which is a huge conflict of interest. Changing that would be new; however, modern times created a problem which needs to be addressed. People forget the problems of government power/corruption are human organization problems which exist in every organization.
Some nations such as Germany require by corporate law that boards have a significant portion of the board be WORKERS or their union. This makes so much sense it is hard to understand why it isn't mentioned in the USA.
The intended purpose of a corporation is to provide gainful employment; however, legally we define it as solely looking out for the share holders. That can be altered; in the past, there was a moral aspect in society which to some degree infected management. Ethics essentially has been removed from the culture and what remains is removed in MBA school.
The balance of powers within government systems has to be extended to everything within their grasp otherwise the loopholes will allow for the creation of monsters beyond the power of the system and will corrupt and hijack the government which defines/regulates them. It's like an unchecked disease becoming an epidemic and then killing off everybody at the CDC. That is where we are today...
USB 3 has DMA support doesn't it?
Everything is getting DMA; HDMI and everything else will have it. All you'll be able to count on is enforced memory restrictions as far as device access. Which still leaves one open to devices messing with each other's DMA.
Firewire has had restrictions for a long time now; depending on hardware and OS support-- I think for about a decade.
The BIG concern should be the cheap hardware out there-- electrical USB-C problems and the crap connectors.... and the never ending list of new connectors which do almost the same thing we have to adapt etc. because somebody has to save a mm or a penny.
Wikileaks can leak documents from US government on other countries...and they have; it is just not intentional (yet) on the part of the US. As far as a bias... the US waging a cold war on Wikileaks does foster resentment...
US elections now involve BILLIONS of dollars in propaganda spending; a great deal of that spending goes to media outlets. Surely you must notice how the "news" of organizations is skewed by their advertisers?
Remember when email viruses were a big thing in the 90s because of Outlook and the media never said Microsoft during their reports? MS advertising did that. I knew a news director, he said how it really works... Or how about how ADM, Monsanto, and other corporations with zero customers will pay huge amounts to advertise on networks with an investigative news capacity? PBS Frontline has probably brought in more corporate donations than any other PBS show.
Remember WMD in Iraq? Cheney planted lies in the NY Times and then cited them in the rush to war. That didn't even cost $ to use NY Times.
Foreign corporations are buying influence in US elections more than ever before (and multinationals who are considered based in the USA should be considered just as bad.) The big bad Russians are a tiny problem; best used as a scapegoat for anybody who wants to play dirty - plus it helps politicians looking for an enemy as they ramp up for another war to save the collapsing American "Empire" card house.