Foxconn as a business has no motivation to use child workers. They have far more adult applicants than they can put to work and the pay is the same. If some kids got in there it was probably a corrupt HR worker trying to get a gig for his nephews or something - and they've improved the screening process, requiring good government ID. That sort of thing happens. Heck, the US military recruited and sent off to war a good many teens during WWII and prior. Every now and then a young person still gets in - though the filtering process for that has improved some too.
These workers are not particularly uneducated. Well educated people go to Foxconn to find work because it pays better than what's otherwise available and it's work that can be had. The company provides onsite schools where workers can pursue degrees as well. When your factory has a half-million people in it it's a city unto itself with all of the infrastructure you would find in any modern city including education, medicine, law enforcement, emergency services, utilities and the like. Not everybody who works there assembles electronics in a factory. Some of them actually design the factory, the machines or processes in it.
A big part of making Foxconn unsympathetic has to do with the lack of good news escaping to the US. Some happy stories about three siblings who saved the family farm by sending back money while earning advanced degrees in their time off from the factory would do it. Hero stories make good popular press. They have to have 50,000 stories like that to draw from with a million employees. They just have to find them and invite honest press to report them - they don't have to fake them up.
More examples: migrant workers from impoverished families find success, rising to middle management - and love in grand community wedding ceremony. Safety reward program pays out $250,000 to workers for identifying risks for elimination. Wonderkid daycare facility spurs child prodigy to musical fame and fortune. Infrastructure workers diligently provide hygenic and safe living conditions that are the envy of the first world, with universal free medical care. And so on.
We already do this at my house, so perhaps the prediction is just for his audience and not for everybody. This is tantalizing close, but it's not quite there. Once there's a true Android Dongle for the HDTV I imagine that there will be an app to make the TV an additional display over wireless, like docking your laptop. You're right - the $100 tablets will do this too if you get the right one because the video hardware decode is typically the last thing they compromise on.
Since I got my transformer, about 90% of my video watching has switched to that - mostly Netflix streaming and streaming from the share. I've watched three full movies on my phone though too.
It was a huge matter of argument when it got written into the US Constitution. Allowing the copyright clause seemed a strategic compromise at the time, but seems now to be a fatal flaw as it has enabled a highly profitable industry determined to use the profits they've garnered thereby to destroy the rest of that document.
Triple the performance is pretty good for cache. I see that too, particularly with the newer SAS RAID controllers with 1GB of flash-backed write cache. A decent modern SATA attached SSD can do something like 70x the IOPs and 20x the bandwidth of a spinning disk though, and also sees additional benefits from RAM caching. The PCIe attached versions can do well over 1000x the IOPs of 15K 6G SAS. No joke, one PCIe attached internal flash drive can outperform on I/O even the most optimally configured array with the 1000 of the fastest available spinning disks (which typically would take at least 3 full racks and 25 KW and have a drive failure every week). And the latency is down near 26 microseconds in the worst case, where a cache miss is best-case 2000 microseconds of latency on a spinning disk.
Solid state: it's just faster. It also costs a bit more, but not offensively so. RAM is getting a lot cheaper these days (about $8/GB for the registered 8GB DIMM) so if you've got a problem set that fits in configurable memory and doesn't require the reliability of static storage during the problem set, RAMDISK is definitely an option again for some. Frankly these RAM prices look crazy cheap to those of us who were praying for the day that RAM dropped below $100/megabyte back in the day. I've paid over $300,000/GB for RAM ($300/MB) - and it was much slower RAM too. Going over the math in my head, apparently I once also paid $2,500,000/TB for HDD storage ($300 for 0.00002 TB) - out of my own pocket as a consumer. That's just crazy.
The question comes down to what is your time worth? What can you do with storage this fast? Does your data fit on the SSDs? Are there other benefits? Everybody has different needs. The available technology is outpacing our needs by a good bit these days. You now can fit all of Peak Twitter into the storage, network and processing capacity of one off-the-rack server - though of course you would use three and geographically isolate them for HA if you were Twitter. These new technologies enable us to do things we couldn't do before - or alternately they allow us to use software that's so offensively bloated it robs us of all the benefit of technology's advance.
Subbing an SSD for your laptop or desktop's boot HDD will get boot times down to mere seconds even in Windows. Anyway, I'm rambling. Time to click "submit".
The web wasn't designed for how we're using it now either. It was supposed to be stateless. How we got here was quite accidental, but both the web and the clients are more than capable enough now so why not?
The point of Android isn't to take over the world. It's to keep an open environment available so Google can do their business without being shut out of the lucrative mobile advertising market. It doesn't have to be huge - it's just got to be available and open enough that Google can't be shut out. By Android keeping the door open, the others must stay just barely open enough to let us have our Googly bits too.
I pay - no kidding - $900 per month for family medical insurance. My employer kicks in a good bit also. Well over $13,000 per year net for my family. But let's look at what the luxurious appointments of care I get for that: Last month my daughter split her chin on a slip on the wet bathroom floor and needed medical care in the middle of the night: basically, some tape and superglue I could have done myself, but I took her to the ER because it looked really nasty (1/3" deep, wife hysterical, &c). My cost for that incident above insurance: $600 (100% of the cost).
For what I'm personally paying in the US just to be sure I have access to a doctor when I need one I'm paying enough to fund a clinic in Africa, China or India that serves hundreds of people. Maybe thousands. A few coworkers and I could divert our contributions and import a doctor to serve just us at these rates.
I wouldn't pay it, but I've been poor in America an have experience with the horrors of not being covered and they've taught me with their prevention of uncovered care that I can't bear to go there, so they got me. $12K/y is far more money than I pay, for example, for either housing or food for my family - and for that money I get absolutely nothing but permission to access a doctor whose services I have to pay full rate (and then some!) for, in cash.
So even though I must pay 100% of the absurdly inflated cost out of pocket, I still also have to pay $12K/y for the insurance also because without the insurance I couldn't get medical treatment or medicine at all. That's insane. That's seriously fucking broken.
Hah! Fix you: The way we do over here in civilized country is to let the poor old folks' teeth rot without dental care until they get sepsis and die, which takes them off the social security rolls. Saves a lot of money that way, though it does induce a bit of guilt, them being incapacitated by pain for decades and all. Anyway, it's a net savings and the mortician never knows the difference. They should have thought about the consequences before they decided to be too poor to afford insurance.
Lots of stuff moves over the road, far more valuable or dangerous to the locals than disabled nuclear warheads. And yes, the geeks would rather not know. That's part of why truckers keep their mouths shut - even when they know what they're hauling. Do you have any idea how many dollars worth of laptops, iPads or - God forbid - iPhones fits in a 24' trailer? You may as well be hauling pallets of $20 bills. And we all now know what a load of 80:0:20 will do to a federal building when mixed with diesel and properly kicked off. Loose lips get your load jacked.
Nobody is trucking around molten aluminum. They truck aluminum in cylindrical ingots. I used to have one that fell off a truck. Funny story: it was still ringing like a bell to touch days later, though the audible sound died off after about 6 hours. It made a nice lamp stand.
Did you know that offshore territorial geothermal resources count? In fact they more than count, as the delta-t and thermal transer properties of seawater are always better. There's stuff that needs inventing here but the electrical energy that Japan needs is local, cheaper than nuclear, and far more abundant than they need for the next thousand years. The very subduction zone that caused the recent tsunami is a vast cauldron of magma just offshore - a reservoir of thermal energy begging to be tapped. New Zealand has such a subduction zone but they're on the very south end of it, and it's more difficult to tap for New Zealand. Same ring of fire, but the fire burns a little dimmer there. Anyway, for New Zealand I would guess the best geothermal resources lie below North Island.
It's early days in geothermal yet. Once upon a time oil bubbled up from the ground and we didn't know what to do with it. Then we discovered it would burn for a long time in a torch. That's about where we're at with geothermal.
Some sort of remix of this recording will appear on the top100 charts in the us inside of 30 days. Probably within the week. I wish we could make it a/. contest of some sort.
I actually do remember a whole lot of that stuff, and they had mod points too. Japan got off lucky on this one. Being an already overpopulated island nation they can hardly bear to give up the hundreds of square kilometers of territory that will be a no-man's land for the next few centuries, but it could have been much worse. Another plant further down the coast just barely managed to keep just enough generators running to complete their shutdown, or they'd have had two whole plants melting down. If the wind had been blowing a little more Easterly and a little faster, Tokyo would be in the No-man's land. Let's be happy it wasn't worse than we already know it was, and hope they still aren't holding out information on us like they were then.
In 30 years whey they can crack the reactor and grope about with robots for the corium my kids may get to find out how bad it really was - because until then we really won't know. What we do know is that for Japan at least the cost of abandoning this land, the cost of cleaning up this mess, the "~1000 deaths" as you so callously put it is a part of the cost of nuclear power they're no longer willing to invest in - and those costs weren't previously figured into their energy budget.
Japan's going to have money and energy issues for 30 years as they turn away from nuclear and burn more imported fossil fuels as a result. If they had not been so overcommitted to nuclear it wouldn't be so bad for them. Their economy will be depressed from this for the rest of my life because Japan is not rich in fossil fuels. It also makes their economy dependent on the foreign fossil fuels market, which is never going to get cheaper, and makes them vulnerable to foreign diplomatic negotiations with a big energy stick.
But hey, let's talk about the evils of coal and petroleum because fossil fuels are the only alternative baseload power to nuclear, particularly for Japan. There's no such thing as effectively limitless safe cheap clean sustainable carbon-neutral freshwater miserly locally-derived geothermal baseload power on a volcanic island chain like Japan. If they had such a thing they'd be using it already, right?
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Not sure about the mouse, but this wireless keyboard project looks pretty neat. I love the Model M keyboard.
Actually, trademark infringement, which makes it even more ironic.
Foxconn as a business has no motivation to use child workers. They have far more adult applicants than they can put to work and the pay is the same. If some kids got in there it was probably a corrupt HR worker trying to get a gig for his nephews or something - and they've improved the screening process, requiring good government ID. That sort of thing happens. Heck, the US military recruited and sent off to war a good many teens during WWII and prior. Every now and then a young person still gets in - though the filtering process for that has improved some too.
These workers are not particularly uneducated. Well educated people go to Foxconn to find work because it pays better than what's otherwise available and it's work that can be had. The company provides onsite schools where workers can pursue degrees as well. When your factory has a half-million people in it it's a city unto itself with all of the infrastructure you would find in any modern city including education, medicine, law enforcement, emergency services, utilities and the like. Not everybody who works there assembles electronics in a factory. Some of them actually design the factory, the machines or processes in it.
A big part of making Foxconn unsympathetic has to do with the lack of good news escaping to the US. Some happy stories about three siblings who saved the family farm by sending back money while earning advanced degrees in their time off from the factory would do it. Hero stories make good popular press. They have to have 50,000 stories like that to draw from with a million employees. They just have to find them and invite honest press to report them - they don't have to fake them up.
More examples: migrant workers from impoverished families find success, rising to middle management - and love in grand community wedding ceremony. Safety reward program pays out $250,000 to workers for identifying risks for elimination. Wonderkid daycare facility spurs child prodigy to musical fame and fortune. Infrastructure workers diligently provide hygenic and safe living conditions that are the envy of the first world, with universal free medical care. And so on.
ZeuS only runs on Windows. This problem will solve itself.
They've been at this for quite a few years and have gotten very good at it.
Yes, it is cool.
We already do this at my house, so perhaps the prediction is just for his audience and not for everybody. This is tantalizing close, but it's not quite there. Once there's a true Android Dongle for the HDTV I imagine that there will be an app to make the TV an additional display over wireless, like docking your laptop. You're right - the $100 tablets will do this too if you get the right one because the video hardware decode is typically the last thing they compromise on.
Since I got my transformer, about 90% of my video watching has switched to that - mostly Netflix streaming and streaming from the share. I've watched three full movies on my phone though too.
Since the vested interests involved have lobbyists to "educate" our lawmakers and potential lawmakers, pretty much never.
It was a huge matter of argument when it got written into the US Constitution. Allowing the copyright clause seemed a strategic compromise at the time, but seems now to be a fatal flaw as it has enabled a highly profitable industry determined to use the profits they've garnered thereby to destroy the rest of that document.
You're not going to get nice shards out of that one.
Triple the performance is pretty good for cache. I see that too, particularly with the newer SAS RAID controllers with 1GB of flash-backed write cache. A decent modern SATA attached SSD can do something like 70x the IOPs and 20x the bandwidth of a spinning disk though, and also sees additional benefits from RAM caching. The PCIe attached versions can do well over 1000x the IOPs of 15K 6G SAS. No joke, one PCIe attached internal flash drive can outperform on I/O even the most optimally configured array with the 1000 of the fastest available spinning disks (which typically would take at least 3 full racks and 25 KW and have a drive failure every week). And the latency is down near 26 microseconds in the worst case, where a cache miss is best-case 2000 microseconds of latency on a spinning disk.
Solid state: it's just faster. It also costs a bit more, but not offensively so. RAM is getting a lot cheaper these days (about $8/GB for the registered 8GB DIMM) so if you've got a problem set that fits in configurable memory and doesn't require the reliability of static storage during the problem set, RAMDISK is definitely an option again for some. Frankly these RAM prices look crazy cheap to those of us who were praying for the day that RAM dropped below $100/megabyte back in the day. I've paid over $300,000/GB for RAM ($300/MB) - and it was much slower RAM too. Going over the math in my head, apparently I once also paid $2,500,000/TB for HDD storage ($300 for 0.00002 TB) - out of my own pocket as a consumer. That's just crazy.
The question comes down to what is your time worth? What can you do with storage this fast? Does your data fit on the SSDs? Are there other benefits? Everybody has different needs. The available technology is outpacing our needs by a good bit these days. You now can fit all of Peak Twitter into the storage, network and processing capacity of one off-the-rack server - though of course you would use three and geographically isolate them for HA if you were Twitter. These new technologies enable us to do things we couldn't do before - or alternately they allow us to use software that's so offensively bloated it robs us of all the benefit of technology's advance.
Subbing an SSD for your laptop or desktop's boot HDD will get boot times down to mere seconds even in Windows. Anyway, I'm rambling. Time to click "submit".
The web wasn't designed for how we're using it now either. It was supposed to be stateless. How we got here was quite accidental, but both the web and the clients are more than capable enough now so why not?
That's genius right there. A shame you didn't sign that one.
The point of Android isn't to take over the world. It's to keep an open environment available so Google can do their business without being shut out of the lucrative mobile advertising market. It doesn't have to be huge - it's just got to be available and open enough that Google can't be shut out. By Android keeping the door open, the others must stay just barely open enough to let us have our Googly bits too.
I pay - no kidding - $900 per month for family medical insurance. My employer kicks in a good bit also. Well over $13,000 per year net for my family. But let's look at what the luxurious appointments of care I get for that: Last month my daughter split her chin on a slip on the wet bathroom floor and needed medical care in the middle of the night: basically, some tape and superglue I could have done myself, but I took her to the ER because it looked really nasty (1/3" deep, wife hysterical, &c). My cost for that incident above insurance: $600 (100% of the cost).
For what I'm personally paying in the US just to be sure I have access to a doctor when I need one I'm paying enough to fund a clinic in Africa, China or India that serves hundreds of people. Maybe thousands. A few coworkers and I could divert our contributions and import a doctor to serve just us at these rates.
I wouldn't pay it, but I've been poor in America an have experience with the horrors of not being covered and they've taught me with their prevention of uncovered care that I can't bear to go there, so they got me. $12K/y is far more money than I pay, for example, for either housing or food for my family - and for that money I get absolutely nothing but permission to access a doctor whose services I have to pay full rate (and then some!) for, in cash.
So even though I must pay 100% of the absurdly inflated cost out of pocket, I still also have to pay $12K/y for the insurance also because without the insurance I couldn't get medical treatment or medicine at all. That's insane. That's seriously fucking broken.
Hah! Fix you: The way we do over here in civilized country is to let the poor old folks' teeth rot without dental care until they get sepsis and die, which takes them off the social security rolls. Saves a lot of money that way, though it does induce a bit of guilt, them being incapacitated by pain for decades and all. Anyway, it's a net savings and the mortician never knows the difference. They should have thought about the consequences before they decided to be too poor to afford insurance.
Lots of stuff moves over the road, far more valuable or dangerous to the locals than disabled nuclear warheads. And yes, the geeks would rather not know. That's part of why truckers keep their mouths shut - even when they know what they're hauling. Do you have any idea how many dollars worth of laptops, iPads or - God forbid - iPhones fits in a 24' trailer? You may as well be hauling pallets of $20 bills. And we all now know what a load of 80:0:20 will do to a federal building when mixed with diesel and properly kicked off. Loose lips get your load jacked.
Nobody is trucking around molten aluminum. They truck aluminum in cylindrical ingots. I used to have one that fell off a truck. Funny story: it was still ringing like a bell to touch days later, though the audible sound died off after about 6 hours. It made a nice lamp stand.
Did you know that offshore territorial geothermal resources count? In fact they more than count, as the delta-t and thermal transer properties of seawater are always better. There's stuff that needs inventing here but the electrical energy that Japan needs is local, cheaper than nuclear, and far more abundant than they need for the next thousand years. The very subduction zone that caused the recent tsunami is a vast cauldron of magma just offshore - a reservoir of thermal energy begging to be tapped. New Zealand has such a subduction zone but they're on the very south end of it, and it's more difficult to tap for New Zealand. Same ring of fire, but the fire burns a little dimmer there. Anyway, for New Zealand I would guess the best geothermal resources lie below North Island.
It's early days in geothermal yet. Once upon a time oil bubbled up from the ground and we didn't know what to do with it. Then we discovered it would burn for a long time in a torch. That's about where we're at with geothermal.
Some sort of remix of this recording will appear on the top100 charts in the us inside of 30 days. Probably within the week. I wish we could make it a /. contest of some sort.
Then you should be worried because the Japanese nuclear regulators weren't any better informed.
I actually do remember a whole lot of that stuff, and they had mod points too. Japan got off lucky on this one. Being an already overpopulated island nation they can hardly bear to give up the hundreds of square kilometers of territory that will be a no-man's land for the next few centuries, but it could have been much worse. Another plant further down the coast just barely managed to keep just enough generators running to complete their shutdown, or they'd have had two whole plants melting down. If the wind had been blowing a little more Easterly and a little faster, Tokyo would be in the No-man's land. Let's be happy it wasn't worse than we already know it was, and hope they still aren't holding out information on us like they were then.
In 30 years whey they can crack the reactor and grope about with robots for the corium my kids may get to find out how bad it really was - because until then we really won't know. What we do know is that for Japan at least the cost of abandoning this land, the cost of cleaning up this mess, the "~1000 deaths" as you so callously put it is a part of the cost of nuclear power they're no longer willing to invest in - and those costs weren't previously figured into their energy budget.
Japan's going to have money and energy issues for 30 years as they turn away from nuclear and burn more imported fossil fuels as a result. If they had not been so overcommitted to nuclear it wouldn't be so bad for them. Their economy will be depressed from this for the rest of my life because Japan is not rich in fossil fuels. It also makes their economy dependent on the foreign fossil fuels market, which is never going to get cheaper, and makes them vulnerable to foreign diplomatic negotiations with a big energy stick.
But hey, let's talk about the evils of coal and petroleum because fossil fuels are the only alternative baseload power to nuclear, particularly for Japan. There's no such thing as effectively limitless safe cheap clean sustainable carbon-neutral freshwater miserly locally-derived geothermal baseload power on a volcanic island chain like Japan. If they had such a thing they'd be using it already, right?
Strangely enough, only 15% of those hamburger businesses are owned by McDonald's. So it's more likely than you might think.