Once a design is approved for manufacture and at the volumes they order, a cable box would cost them pennies.
Nonsense. A cable box needs a power supply. Whether that's built-in or external, you can find similar specced power supplies eg. on eBay around the $2 mark. Not much, but still a few $ you can't really get around. And you don't want the cheapest you can find, but one that won't make your customer's house go up in flames. Homeless customers tend to be non-paying customers, you know...
Then it needs a case. Sure maybe some Chinese manufacturer can poop out the plastic parts for say, $0.50 to $1 a pop, but again that's $0.50 or $1 you can't get around. Likewise you need a circuit board, a chipset to go on it, connectors, the odd cable thrown in, probably some kind of display (like 7-segment LED style or VFD). SATA enabled chipset plus some kind of storage if that's included. Maybe some lawyers are happy to add say, $0.15/unit worth of patent royalties per box. Remote control - some batteries included, right? You want to ship that in a plastic bag? No, better a cardboard box + plastic bags for each separate item. Oh and a printed manual I hope? At least a quick start guide.
Etc etc. None of such items are expensive, but you still need a number of them before you've got a ready-to-ship cable box. All those little bits add up. Whether you add up those bits or buy from a 3rd party that does it for you - same result. That $35-55 range another poster mentioned, sounds about right. Better hope that $55 price point includes storage...:-)
Energy = cost. No matter how you obtain that energy. For example solar panels, wiring, voltage converters etc. come at a cost, even the input (sunlight) is free. Same thing when having mining gear double as space heater. The waste heat may be useful, but it's still an expensive space heater.
High energy use for transactions = more overhead costs per transaction. Making small transactions relatively expensive. For that reason alone I'd expect better designed crypto currencies to replace Bitcoin at some point. It simply wouldn't be viable if another coin does the same thing(s) while using less energy.
Ya...AI has become Market Speak these days.
Anything that can do something faster than a person is, "AI".
"Do" as in: do the thinking part better or faster than a human. Hence the intelligence in AI. And yes it's artificial - it doesn't grow in nature, humans put it together.
So AI is very much appropriate in this context, even if used as marketing speak.
The security bugs are not present in the implants themselves, but rather in Medtronic "programmers," which doctors and medics connect to patients' implants during and after surgery, allowing them to check battery levels, monitor heart rhythms, and adjust any settings.
So -in this case- it's not patients' pacemakers etc at risk, but the equipment that monitors those pacemakers & perhaps adjust their settings. I'd imagine that as a hacker, you could (perhaps) still do some damage like adjust settings to the point where a pacemaker becomes ineffective. But this is rather different from upload-compromised-firmware-to-implant, which the summary might suggest to some.
It's some 25 years old and it convinced me how good a text adventure can still be while competing with graphics extravangant modern games,
Heh, don't think I ever played a text adventure on anything other than an 8 bit machine lol. "The Hobbit" on Sinclair ZX Spectrum comes to mind...
I think the strength of text adventures is exactly that they draw on the imagination of the player. Player has to fill in (in his/her mind) what graphics don't provide. Kind of like reading a novel where a picture forms in your mind but the words only say so much about what it should like like so the reader fills in the rest.
This will fix everything, older android can be updated, linux systems like phones and tablets can be updated, forever.
No it won't. Basic premise for Android is:
Issue gets fixed in upstream kernel (Linux)
Fix 'trickles down' into some open source Android release
Carrier or phone vendor produces updated build that end users can install
That last bit simply isn't happening. As much as they can get away with, carriers or phone vendors just do a few updates (say over a year, 2 years if you're lucky), and that's it.
The way around that requires a couple of things:
Open source drivers for the hardware in the phone (as you stated)
Some community project that takes those drivers & produces updated builds for phone models X, Y or Z. In practice, there aren't many of those community projects (active), and # of supported models is limited.
Some way to upload that build to your phone. Read: an unlocked bootloader. Which is the exception rather than the rule for Android phones (eg. my phone doesn't come with an unlocked bootloader afaik).
Bottom line: in most cases end users are still stuck, even if open source drivers are available. Android's update model is simply broken to begin with.
Where'd the chips come from? They are physical things that exist. Do you think Bloomberg faked the paper trail all the way up the supply chain (..)
Bloomberg says A, Apple, Amazon etc say B. That's where you need to back up your claim.
If Bloomberg did its job, it should have some expert(s) on call that can tell you what motherboard, what chip / where on the board, what pinout, what it does, and how they arrived at those findings. That's the core of their story after all.
If Bloomberg does, just publish those technical details & call it a day. If Bloomberg doesn't, then yes they are talking out of their nose and Apple, Amazon & co have every right to criticize them.
How many years would it take me not filling up for $80/month (..)
Where I live (NL), gasoline hovers around or above the €1.50 mark. So US$ 80 would buy you about 50 litres of gas, which would get you like what, a range equivalent of 2 full charges on a Tesla? That's ignoring road taxes etc, which over here in the EU tend to be pretty favourable towards hybrid & electric vehicles.
Over in the US, gasoline powered cars are only cheap to operate because other people are paying the real cost of said gasoline. Wars in the middle east, trade wars, subsidies,...
It's not just on Azure that Microsoft is embracing Linux.
Just make your next desktop OS (Windows XI ?) be a Linux based, MS ripped-from-somewhere GUI, and you're all set. No reason you couldn't include the usual spyware in such a system. Linux zealots would work hard to make such a desktop perform excellent across the widest choice of hardware options out there.
After that's said 'n done, Linux on Azure is just another day in the office.
That's the reason I regard spiders as 'friendly room mates': they rarely bother me, while I hate a lot of what's on their menu. Not to mention there are no (or extremely few) poisonous spiders where I live. Never understood people's fear of them other than the surprise of one dropping into your field of vision unexpected. YMMV if you live in (mostly tropical) areas where poisonous creatures crawl into your shoes or lurk under toilet seats etc.
So I never hit spiders with a fly squatter, move them out of the house, or flush one down a sink. Sure I'll remove some webs if they make things look dirty / messy, or I'll poke one to move the other way if it decides to drop in front of my screen. But otherwise they're free to move. And no, there aren't many spiders in my room - I regularly kill the same annoying insects they do, so the spiders must survive on whatever escapes me. Which isn't much.:-)
Dunno about you guys... But for me, "no option to load other software besides what's pre-loaded" means: no sale. Regardless of tech specs or built-in library.
On a hardware level, these are general purpose computing devices. And therefore it's only reasonable to be able to load "software", not just "software the original vendor chooses to approve". More so for a system that was originally released decades ago.
Politicians probably aren't spending most of their reading time on websites, but rather going through thick reports, proposals, notes from committee meetings on a subject, etc. Reading material of which there is a *LOT*. In that situation it's easy to overlook some important detail(s), or misunderstand the implications of some of what's on the table.
That said, it's a poor excuse imho. If you don't understand what you're voting for, then vote against, abstain, or decide with your colleagues you need more time to go through the material. You're stuck with it for a couple of weeks or months, but if it results in a bad law, then the population may be stuck with it for many years. So do your homework!
There's absolutely no way any cryptocurrency will ever gain a foothold as a currency used for every day transactions if the best it can offer is, as you said, 80% price plunges every two or three years.
That still wouldn't be a problem if transactions were quick, cheap, and you'd have some intermediate store of value.
Say I receive X Bitcoin as payment for a job, and buy X Bitcoin worth of coffee beans for that. Then I sit on that for a year (Bitcoin goes up to 15x what it was when I bought the coffee beans), I sell the coffee beans for 1/15X worth of Bitcoin, and exchange that into whatever 1/15X Bitcoin is worth then. Most likely, somewhere near the price of that stack of coffee beans I started with.
That would be entirely feasible if transaction costs were low, transactions quick, with enough intermediate stores of value to choose from. But from what I've read transactions are slow and/or costly. Meaning the exchange rate may go up or down 10-20% or more while I'm waiting for a transaction to go through. And for small exchanges, transaction costs may be a significant part of the total. Not to mention the limit # of places that will take Bitcoin as payment. That is why it's no use for every day transactions.
Ever seen that famous Apple commercial about the misfits, the rebels, the round pegs in the square holes? If you haven't: be sure to watch until its conclusion.
I admire Elon Musk greatly, because he IS one of these people. While the world at large thought "electric cars will arrive some day", and 1 or 2 car manufacturers had some concept cars out, Musk was busy gathering a team and push the envelope. And big name car manufacturers were forced to put their models out left & right, but years behind Tesla in the engineering side of things. And now electric cars (and charging infrastructure) are popping up everywhere as a viable option.
When the importance of battery technology became obvious (for electric vehicles, but also grid storage etc), Musk set out to push prices down by scaling numbers up. And now runs one of (or the?) biggest battery-making factories. And sells a powerpack you can hang on your wall. Or is more than 1 gigafactory already? Not keeping a close eye on that...:-)
Dabbling 'on the side' in private space flight, launching a sports car towards Mars, some tunnel boring stuff, etc.
So whether he's a nutjob, or a genius, or more likely: both, I admire him because he is one of those rare people who go out and DRIVE HUMANITY FORWARD. For that reason alone I wouldn't mind tossing some money his way. Maybe that's one reason why Tesla stock seems to defy logic lately?
Our problem is that nobody has built intelligence yet (..)
Depends on your definition of intelligence. Personally I tend towards "problem solving ability", and in that sense a Pac-Man ghost moving the other way to avoid you after you've picked up a power pill, is essentially no different from you ducking down to avoid an object thrown at you. So in that sense, AI has been with us ever since we've built 'thinking' machines that have some problem-solving ability.
Does it matter whether it's grey cells, a pre-programmed rule set, or some complex type of pattern recognition? Environment provides a stimulus, and out comes a response. With increasing complexity in between up to (and including) the point where you can't tell any more whether it's human behaviour or some artificial system.
Interesting thought: this may lead to a situation where AI will deal in emotions too. Will display happiness upon recognising a person considered 'friendly', a kind of 'pain' when a mechanical failure occurs, or sadness when it's told a sad story. Draw this further, and some AI system may evolve to the point where they are seen as full personalities. Artificial humans if you will (but possibly in strange physical form) that deserve some of the same basic 'human' rights as the rest of us. "No way!" will probably be most people's first response. Let's revisit that again once many of us had a meaningful conversation with an AI that felt just as real as exchanging thoughts with a fellow human being. Stories like this is only the beginning.
What's more: using the same SoC, performance may still vary due to cpu / gpu / memory clocks. But higher clocks translate to higher power consumption. For a portable device, that means more battery drain. So even if you can run apps a few % faster, you'll only be able to do (roughly) the same amount of work before battery runs empty.
In battery operated devices, you'll often see that components aren't clocked up to their highest possible spec. The above is one important reason for that. Local heating / stability issues may be another.
Another way to bump performance is to add RAM. There's are some situations where more RAM may help performance without (much of) the battery drain penalty. But of course extra RAM costs $ and in many cases that's just not worth it.
Paying 92.5£/MWh for nuclear (Hinkley Point C) is peanuts in comparison with the 195£/MWh for the offshore wind farms.
Does that number include costs for post-operation dismantling of the facility, cleanup of the site, storage of the waste products over the centuries or more that may be needed, compensation / cleanup costs in case of accident(s) over the course of its operation, or release of radioactive waste products that may be within regulatory norms but still ends up in the environment?
And b) if it includes post-operational cleanup costs: is that number realistic? In the case of nuclear, history tends to show otherwise.
That study puts starfish as cause of 42% of coral losses per year. Seriously?
Reef has been there for hundreds, more likely thousands of years. Same for the starfish. Personal hypothesis: environmental conditions change (for example, sea water acidity), coral weakens as a result, and starfish take advantage of the situation.
Cause of death of the coral? Yes. Cause of the problem in the overall scheme of things? Hell no - external factors. It's those external factors we should be looking at. Not those starfish that do what they do once conditions are favourable.
Most incandescent bulbs are not rated anywhere near that long (most of the commercial ones were something like 1000 hours when I was still buying them) and the ones that could last that long are vastly different in design than the cheap commercial bulbs that were being sold.
Not "vastly different", just a thicker (=stronger) filament wire, and -possibly- tweaks to wire supports, gas mixture or whatever.
It's easy to make a long lasting incandescent. But it would also be very inefficient - worse than they already are. Therefore an 'optimum' is picked where bulbs don't need replacing too often, but still have acceptable efficiency. That optimum is picked around 1000 hours for regular incandescents (longer for halogen lamps due to their halogen cycle). Make 'em longer lasting, and you pay more for electricity. Make 'em more efficient, and you replace bulbs more often. So contrary to what some people think, that is not some industry conspiracy! Of course within that efficiency <-> longevity spectrum (no pun intended;-) there can still be quality differences between bulbs.
Longer lasting incandescents do exist. Mostly meant for industrial uses where bulb replacement may be more costly than pulling some extra Watts. But such bulbs don't get around the problem described above. Likewise you can run incandescents on a lower voltage to increase their lifespan (in the case of halogens, only within limits). See "lamp rerating". But effectively that just takes the remaining few % of efficiency, and adds it to the waste heat you already had.
Eat 50% carbs and get your protein & fat from nuts & beans.
Hmm.. pretty much what I've been aiming for since a couple of years. Almost no sugar, and don't be afraid of fats! Just watch the kinds of fats & what other nutrients (protein, minerals, fibres etc) their sources come with. As the body adapts to pull calories from fats & high-fibre 'slow' carbs (vs. from sugar and low-fibre carbs found in many processed foods), blood sugar highs and lows tend to disappear. Making you loose those cravings for sugar rich, unhealthy in-between snacks.
One thing the article fails to mention: animal fat tends to be high in saturated fats, which are considered not-so-healthy. Whereas plant based fats tend to be high in mono- or polyunsaturated fats, which are considered healthier than the saturated variety. This could explain some of the differences.
Note that although plant based, for example coconut or palm oil (the latter put in almost any processed food these days) are also high in saturated fats. And thus may fall into the not-so-healthy camp. Not to mention ratio of omega-3 vs. omega-6 fats in a diet. Also FTA:
(..) greater consumption of animal proteins and fats, which have been linked to inflammation and ageing in the body.
Yeah, tends to be unhealthy and shorten life of the animals involved, too. One of many good reasons for having been a veggie most of my life.
Probably top management (or shareholders) mostly care about the bottom line. Or worse: nothing but the bottom line. But even then: hiring workers from a low-wage country that only care about the pay, could be worse for that bottom line than hiring workers from a higher-wage country if they care about things besides pay. Likewise if that decision affects customers' perception of the company.
So even assuming the worst for management's motives, having a look at those non-monetary incentives could be beneficial for the bottom line. Not to mention other yardsticks along which a company's performance might be measured.
30% is a fair market price for the service provided. The service in question is access to a vast marketplace (..)
.. which is not Google's to sell access to. Although Google is a great force behind Android, the bulk of it are open source components developed (or at least: created) elsewhere. At least in theory it's an open platform, you don't need Google to use Android. You don't need to go through Google's app store to distribute apps for it. So Google doesn't deserve payment for the privilege of 'allowing' a developer into the Android ecosystem.
What's Google's cut for then? Download bandwidth: peanuts. Promotion? Sure, but for a game like Fortnite that will go through many channels of which Google Play is only one. Perhaps not even an important one. Customer support? Surely for a game like Fortnite, Epic's job will go way beyond what Google provides in that area. Malware checks? A non-feature for a big-name trusted source like Epic.
Being a longtime game developer and distributor, Epic knows what these costs are. They've done the math, and found that Google's cut is much higher than their service is worth. At that point it's only logical to look for a way around it. For a small Indie developer that may work out differently, but Epic isn't one of those.
Okay it's not user friendly install-wise. But at least Epic will be left with more $$ to put into their next projects. Win-win for Epic & their users alike.
So you're going to walk or bike to the store every day? How many bags of groceries can you carry for a family? Do you have the time to shop every day or do you have help to bring those groceries back?
a) If I really want, I can carry over a month's worth of groceries (for myself) on my bicycle. In a single haul. Reason I don't, mostly concerns perishable stuff like vegetables or dairy (although some of that easily keeps for weeks in a fridge). Or being selective about what to buy where, when, and how much to pack on my bicycle each run.
If you can't, buy something better than a $5 bicycle or -bags next time. No superhuman powers needed.
b) Does this even matter when a shop is around the corner or just a few blocks away?
Obviously this won't hold true for everyone, so "You do what you want, and I do what I want" sure, no problem. But don't say you couldn't supply a family with groceries using feet or bike only. That's simply not true.
A more interesting question would be what size a city ideally should be, to limit overall transport costs to a minimum. Smaller than that -> big cities' efficiencies of scale are lost. Bigger than that -> average distance from producer to consumer goes up as goods are trucked in from a wider area (and between different areas of town). I've read sometime an optimum may be small cities of several tens of thousands of inhabitants. But an actual number probably depends on many -changing- factors.
The "hidden" cost they're talking about is NOT reflected in the price.
Anyone who's ever read Friedrich Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" should know: externalities apart, some way, somehow any extra environmental burden (read: resource usage) will be worked into the price. Trucks can't drive around extra miles at US$0 / mile cost. No matter how cheap the gas or how little they pay their drivers.
Maybe prices don't differentiate between environmentally efficient or wasteful options. Maybe there are some externalities that enable Amazon to ship goods cheaper than they should be. But gas still costs money. Electricity too. More trucking miles = more trucks needed, more driver time, and more maintenance to do on those trucks. And with Amazon being a for-profit company, those extra costs will have to be recouped somehow. Either in higher prices for products, or higher prices for premium services.
So grandparent is right. The only thing (possibly) hidden is how end-user pricing is calculated.
Slashdot Mirror
Once a design is approved for manufacture and at the volumes they order, a cable box would cost them pennies.
Nonsense. A cable box needs a power supply. Whether that's built-in or external, you can find similar specced power supplies eg. on eBay around the $2 mark. Not much, but still a few $ you can't really get around. And you don't want the cheapest you can find, but one that won't make your customer's house go up in flames. Homeless customers tend to be non-paying customers, you know...
Then it needs a case. Sure maybe some Chinese manufacturer can poop out the plastic parts for say, $0.50 to $1 a pop, but again that's $0.50 or $1 you can't get around. Likewise you need a circuit board, a chipset to go on it, connectors, the odd cable thrown in, probably some kind of display (like 7-segment LED style or VFD). SATA enabled chipset plus some kind of storage if that's included. Maybe some lawyers are happy to add say, $0.15/unit worth of patent royalties per box. Remote control - some batteries included, right? You want to ship that in a plastic bag? No, better a cardboard box + plastic bags for each separate item. Oh and a printed manual I hope? At least a quick start guide.
Etc etc. None of such items are expensive, but you still need a number of them before you've got a ready-to-ship cable box. All those little bits add up. Whether you add up those bits or buy from a 3rd party that does it for you - same result. That $35-55 range another poster mentioned, sounds about right. Better hope that $55 price point includes storage... :-)
Energy = cost. No matter how you obtain that energy. For example solar panels, wiring, voltage converters etc. come at a cost, even the input (sunlight) is free. Same thing when having mining gear double as space heater. The waste heat may be useful, but it's still an expensive space heater.
High energy use for transactions = more overhead costs per transaction. Making small transactions relatively expensive. For that reason alone I'd expect better designed crypto currencies to replace Bitcoin at some point. It simply wouldn't be viable if another coin does the same thing(s) while using less energy.
It sucks their rocket didn't make it, (..)
That's unusual! Normally it blows when a rocket doesn't make it.
Ya...AI has become Market Speak these days. Anything that can do something faster than a person is, "AI".
"Do" as in: do the thinking part better or faster than a human. Hence the intelligence in AI. And yes it's artificial - it doesn't grow in nature, humans put it together.
So AI is very much appropriate in this context, even if used as marketing speak.
From the article:
The security bugs are not present in the implants themselves, but rather in Medtronic "programmers," which doctors and medics connect to patients' implants during and after surgery, allowing them to check battery levels, monitor heart rhythms, and adjust any settings.
So -in this case- it's not patients' pacemakers etc at risk, but the equipment that monitors those pacemakers & perhaps adjust their settings. I'd imagine that as a hacker, you could (perhaps) still do some damage like adjust settings to the point where a pacemaker becomes ineffective. But this is rather different from upload-compromised-firmware-to-implant, which the summary might suggest to some.
It's some 25 years old and it convinced me how good a text adventure can still be while competing with graphics extravangant modern games,
Heh, don't think I ever played a text adventure on anything other than an 8 bit machine lol. "The Hobbit" on Sinclair ZX Spectrum comes to mind...
I think the strength of text adventures is exactly that they draw on the imagination of the player. Player has to fill in (in his/her mind) what graphics don't provide. Kind of like reading a novel where a picture forms in your mind but the words only say so much about what it should like like so the reader fills in the rest.
This will fix everything, older android can be updated, linux systems like phones and tablets can be updated, forever.
No it won't. Basic premise for Android is:
That last bit simply isn't happening. As much as they can get away with, carriers or phone vendors just do a few updates (say over a year, 2 years if you're lucky), and that's it.
The way around that requires a couple of things:
Bottom line: in most cases end users are still stuck, even if open source drivers are available. Android's update model is simply broken to begin with.
Where'd the chips come from? They are physical things that exist. Do you think Bloomberg faked the paper trail all the way up the supply chain (..)
Bloomberg says A, Apple, Amazon etc say B. That's where you need to back up your claim.
If Bloomberg did its job, it should have some expert(s) on call that can tell you what motherboard, what chip / where on the board, what pinout, what it does, and how they arrived at those findings. That's the core of their story after all.
If Bloomberg does, just publish those technical details & call it a day. If Bloomberg doesn't, then yes they are talking out of their nose and Apple, Amazon & co have every right to criticize them.
How many years would it take me not filling up for $80/month (..)
Where I live (NL), gasoline hovers around or above the €1.50 mark. So US$ 80 would buy you about 50 litres of gas, which would get you like what, a range equivalent of 2 full charges on a Tesla? That's ignoring road taxes etc, which over here in the EU tend to be pretty favourable towards hybrid & electric vehicles.
Over in the US, gasoline powered cars are only cheap to operate because other people are paying the real cost of said gasoline. Wars in the middle east, trade wars, subsidies, ...
It's not just on Azure that Microsoft is embracing Linux.
Just make your next desktop OS (Windows XI ?) be a Linux based, MS ripped-from-somewhere GUI, and you're all set. No reason you couldn't include the usual spyware in such a system. Linux zealots would work hard to make such a desktop perform excellent across the widest choice of hardware options out there.
After that's said 'n done, Linux on Azure is just another day in the office.
That's the reason I regard spiders as 'friendly room mates': they rarely bother me, while I hate a lot of what's on their menu. Not to mention there are no (or extremely few) poisonous spiders where I live. Never understood people's fear of them other than the surprise of one dropping into your field of vision unexpected. YMMV if you live in (mostly tropical) areas where poisonous creatures crawl into your shoes or lurk under toilet seats etc.
So I never hit spiders with a fly squatter, move them out of the house, or flush one down a sink. Sure I'll remove some webs if they make things look dirty / messy, or I'll poke one to move the other way if it decides to drop in front of my screen. But otherwise they're free to move. And no, there aren't many spiders in my room - I regularly kill the same annoying insects they do, so the spiders must survive on whatever escapes me. Which isn't much. :-)
Nope, pre installed games only.
Dunno about you guys... But for me, "no option to load other software besides what's pre-loaded" means: no sale. Regardless of tech specs or built-in library.
On a hardware level, these are general purpose computing devices. And therefore it's only reasonable to be able to load "software", not just "software the original vendor chooses to approve". More so for a system that was originally released decades ago.
Politicians probably aren't spending most of their reading time on websites, but rather going through thick reports, proposals, notes from committee meetings on a subject, etc. Reading material of which there is a *LOT*. In that situation it's easy to overlook some important detail(s), or misunderstand the implications of some of what's on the table.
That said, it's a poor excuse imho. If you don't understand what you're voting for, then vote against, abstain, or decide with your colleagues you need more time to go through the material. You're stuck with it for a couple of weeks or months, but if it results in a bad law, then the population may be stuck with it for many years. So do your homework!
There's absolutely no way any cryptocurrency will ever gain a foothold as a currency used for every day transactions if the best it can offer is, as you said, 80% price plunges every two or three years.
That still wouldn't be a problem if transactions were quick, cheap, and you'd have some intermediate store of value.
Say I receive X Bitcoin as payment for a job, and buy X Bitcoin worth of coffee beans for that. Then I sit on that for a year (Bitcoin goes up to 15x what it was when I bought the coffee beans), I sell the coffee beans for 1/15X worth of Bitcoin, and exchange that into whatever 1/15X Bitcoin is worth then. Most likely, somewhere near the price of that stack of coffee beans I started with.
That would be entirely feasible if transaction costs were low, transactions quick, with enough intermediate stores of value to choose from. But from what I've read transactions are slow and/or costly. Meaning the exchange rate may go up or down 10-20% or more while I'm waiting for a transaction to go through. And for small exchanges, transaction costs may be a significant part of the total. Not to mention the limit # of places that will take Bitcoin as payment. That is why it's no use for every day transactions.
Ever seen that famous Apple commercial about the misfits, the rebels, the round pegs in the square holes? If you haven't: be sure to watch until its conclusion.
I admire Elon Musk greatly, because he IS one of these people. While the world at large thought "electric cars will arrive some day", and 1 or 2 car manufacturers had some concept cars out, Musk was busy gathering a team and push the envelope. And big name car manufacturers were forced to put their models out left & right, but years behind Tesla in the engineering side of things. And now electric cars (and charging infrastructure) are popping up everywhere as a viable option.
When the importance of battery technology became obvious (for electric vehicles, but also grid storage etc), Musk set out to push prices down by scaling numbers up. And now runs one of (or the?) biggest battery-making factories. And sells a powerpack you can hang on your wall. Or is more than 1 gigafactory already? Not keeping a close eye on that... :-)
Dabbling 'on the side' in private space flight, launching a sports car towards Mars, some tunnel boring stuff, etc.
So whether he's a nutjob, or a genius, or more likely: both, I admire him because he is one of those rare people who go out and DRIVE HUMANITY FORWARD. For that reason alone I wouldn't mind tossing some money his way. Maybe that's one reason why Tesla stock seems to defy logic lately?
Our problem is that nobody has built intelligence yet (..)
Depends on your definition of intelligence. Personally I tend towards "problem solving ability", and in that sense a Pac-Man ghost moving the other way to avoid you after you've picked up a power pill, is essentially no different from you ducking down to avoid an object thrown at you. So in that sense, AI has been with us ever since we've built 'thinking' machines that have some problem-solving ability.
Does it matter whether it's grey cells, a pre-programmed rule set, or some complex type of pattern recognition? Environment provides a stimulus, and out comes a response. With increasing complexity in between up to (and including) the point where you can't tell any more whether it's human behaviour or some artificial system.
Interesting thought: this may lead to a situation where AI will deal in emotions too. Will display happiness upon recognising a person considered 'friendly', a kind of 'pain' when a mechanical failure occurs, or sadness when it's told a sad story. Draw this further, and some AI system may evolve to the point where they are seen as full personalities. Artificial humans if you will (but possibly in strange physical form) that deserve some of the same basic 'human' rights as the rest of us. "No way!" will probably be most people's first response. Let's revisit that again once many of us had a meaningful conversation with an AI that felt just as real as exchanging thoughts with a fellow human being. Stories like this is only the beginning.
What's more: using the same SoC, performance may still vary due to cpu / gpu / memory clocks. But higher clocks translate to higher power consumption. For a portable device, that means more battery drain. So even if you can run apps a few % faster, you'll only be able to do (roughly) the same amount of work before battery runs empty.
In battery operated devices, you'll often see that components aren't clocked up to their highest possible spec. The above is one important reason for that. Local heating / stability issues may be another.
Another way to bump performance is to add RAM. There's are some situations where more RAM may help performance without (much of) the battery drain penalty. But of course extra RAM costs $ and in many cases that's just not worth it.
Paying 92.5£/MWh for nuclear (Hinkley Point C) is peanuts in comparison with the 195£/MWh for the offshore wind farms.
Does that number include costs for post-operation dismantling of the facility, cleanup of the site, storage of the waste products over the centuries or more that may be needed, compensation / cleanup costs in case of accident(s) over the course of its operation, or release of radioactive waste products that may be within regulatory norms but still ends up in the environment?
And b) if it includes post-operational cleanup costs: is that number realistic? In the case of nuclear, history tends to show otherwise.
That study puts starfish as cause of 42% of coral losses per year. Seriously?
Reef has been there for hundreds, more likely thousands of years. Same for the starfish. Personal hypothesis: environmental conditions change (for example, sea water acidity), coral weakens as a result, and starfish take advantage of the situation.
Cause of death of the coral? Yes. Cause of the problem in the overall scheme of things? Hell no - external factors. It's those external factors we should be looking at. Not those starfish that do what they do once conditions are favourable.
Most incandescent bulbs are not rated anywhere near that long (most of the commercial ones were something like 1000 hours when I was still buying them) and the ones that could last that long are vastly different in design than the cheap commercial bulbs that were being sold.
Not "vastly different", just a thicker (=stronger) filament wire, and -possibly- tweaks to wire supports, gas mixture or whatever.
It's easy to make a long lasting incandescent. But it would also be very inefficient - worse than they already are. Therefore an 'optimum' is picked where bulbs don't need replacing too often, but still have acceptable efficiency. That optimum is picked around 1000 hours for regular incandescents (longer for halogen lamps due to their halogen cycle). Make 'em longer lasting, and you pay more for electricity. Make 'em more efficient, and you replace bulbs more often. So contrary to what some people think, that is not some industry conspiracy! Of course within that efficiency <-> longevity spectrum (no pun intended ;-) there can still be quality differences between bulbs.
Longer lasting incandescents do exist. Mostly meant for industrial uses where bulb replacement may be more costly than pulling some extra Watts. But such bulbs don't get around the problem described above. Likewise you can run incandescents on a lower voltage to increase their lifespan (in the case of halogens, only within limits). See "lamp rerating". But effectively that just takes the remaining few % of efficiency, and adds it to the waste heat you already had.
Eat 50% carbs and get your protein & fat from nuts & beans.
Hmm.. pretty much what I've been aiming for since a couple of years. Almost no sugar, and don't be afraid of fats! Just watch the kinds of fats & what other nutrients (protein, minerals, fibres etc) their sources come with. As the body adapts to pull calories from fats & high-fibre 'slow' carbs (vs. from sugar and low-fibre carbs found in many processed foods), blood sugar highs and lows tend to disappear. Making you loose those cravings for sugar rich, unhealthy in-between snacks.
One thing the article fails to mention: animal fat tends to be high in saturated fats, which are considered not-so-healthy. Whereas plant based fats tend to be high in mono- or polyunsaturated fats, which are considered healthier than the saturated variety. This could explain some of the differences.
Note that although plant based, for example coconut or palm oil (the latter put in almost any processed food these days) are also high in saturated fats. And thus may fall into the not-so-healthy camp. Not to mention ratio of omega-3 vs. omega-6 fats in a diet. Also FTA:
(..) greater consumption of animal proteins and fats, which have been linked to inflammation and ageing in the body.
Yeah, tends to be unhealthy and shorten life of the animals involved, too. One of many good reasons for having been a veggie most of my life.
Probably top management (or shareholders) mostly care about the bottom line. Or worse: nothing but the bottom line. But even then: hiring workers from a low-wage country that only care about the pay, could be worse for that bottom line than hiring workers from a higher-wage country if they care about things besides pay. Likewise if that decision affects customers' perception of the company.
So even assuming the worst for management's motives, having a look at those non-monetary incentives could be beneficial for the bottom line. Not to mention other yardsticks along which a company's performance might be measured.
30% is a fair market price for the service provided. The service in question is access to a vast marketplace (..)
What's Google's cut for then? Download bandwidth: peanuts. Promotion? Sure, but for a game like Fortnite that will go through many channels of which Google Play is only one. Perhaps not even an important one. Customer support? Surely for a game like Fortnite, Epic's job will go way beyond what Google provides in that area. Malware checks? A non-feature for a big-name trusted source like Epic.
Being a longtime game developer and distributor, Epic knows what these costs are. They've done the math, and found that Google's cut is much higher than their service is worth. At that point it's only logical to look for a way around it. For a small Indie developer that may work out differently, but Epic isn't one of those.
Okay it's not user friendly install-wise. But at least Epic will be left with more $$ to put into their next projects. Win-win for Epic & their users alike.
So you're going to walk or bike to the store every day? How many bags of groceries can you carry for a family? Do you have the time to shop every day or do you have help to bring those groceries back?
a) If I really want, I can carry over a month's worth of groceries (for myself) on my bicycle. In a single haul. Reason I don't, mostly concerns perishable stuff like vegetables or dairy (although some of that easily keeps for weeks in a fridge). Or being selective about what to buy where, when, and how much to pack on my bicycle each run.
If you can't, buy something better than a $5 bicycle or -bags next time. No superhuman powers needed.
b) Does this even matter when a shop is around the corner or just a few blocks away?
Obviously this won't hold true for everyone, so "You do what you want, and I do what I want" sure, no problem. But don't say you couldn't supply a family with groceries using feet or bike only. That's simply not true.
A more interesting question would be what size a city ideally should be, to limit overall transport costs to a minimum. Smaller than that -> big cities' efficiencies of scale are lost. Bigger than that -> average distance from producer to consumer goes up as goods are trucked in from a wider area (and between different areas of town). I've read sometime an optimum may be small cities of several tens of thousands of inhabitants. But an actual number probably depends on many -changing- factors.
The "hidden" cost they're talking about is NOT reflected in the price.
Anyone who's ever read Friedrich Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" should know: externalities apart, some way, somehow any extra environmental burden (read: resource usage) will be worked into the price. Trucks can't drive around extra miles at US$0 / mile cost. No matter how cheap the gas or how little they pay their drivers.
Maybe prices don't differentiate between environmentally efficient or wasteful options. Maybe there are some externalities that enable Amazon to ship goods cheaper than they should be. But gas still costs money. Electricity too. More trucking miles = more trucks needed, more driver time, and more maintenance to do on those trucks. And with Amazon being a for-profit company, those extra costs will have to be recouped somehow. Either in higher prices for products, or higher prices for premium services.
So grandparent is right. The only thing (possibly) hidden is how end-user pricing is calculated.