That's never going to happen. If you look at bans, you simply end up with black markets that experience varying degrees of violence. By contrast, taxing a product is a way to take an inexpensive product and compel a change in its use. You take that inexpensive product and turn it into an expensive one and generally people will reduce their use of that product even if only to keep the outlay the same.
The three most obvious cases are alcohol with the history of Prohibition, the modern fight against drugs that are defined as controlled substances, and the history of tobacco and cigarettes in particular. The first two were/are abject failures. To stop the violence alcohol had to be re-legalized, and many states are pushing against the illegality of many drugs. Cigarettes by contrast are merely expensive, expensive enough that many people have stopped smoking them even though they remain legal to those old enough.
If the latter, let me know when and where. I'll bring the laserdisc player and my matted widescreen version meant to show it widescreen on a 4:3 TV. We'll show it via composite video on a native-widescreen and let him or her choose the aspect ratio on the display, but none of them will look right. Zoom will be blocky, stretch will be skewed wide, and 4:3 will be tiny and show overscan and additional black bars on the sides in addition to the top and bottom..
Friends of mine had a very, very early projector TV that had a large box about the size of a dishwasher housing a three-element projector that sat on the floor, with steel square-tubes that led to the wall, where an upright set of steel square-tubes had a curved parabolic screen mounted to them, that at the dead-center was exactly ninety degrees perpendicular to the projector. Even back then, the curve screen was not desirable, it was necessary in order to get the image to look right on a screen the better part of a hundred inches across the diagonal. The three projector elements were not perfectly in-parallax to each other when shining on a flat surface, but the curve of the screen allowed the image to be produced without significant parallax error on the colors.
I admit I was hooked on projectors from that point, but by the time I was able to get a projector for TV, office projectors that didn't need curved screens were readily available. I still have my first one actually, only 800x600 and a dim 300 lumens, but it has optical parallax correction and gets its image through a single LCD, so there are not problems with colors being out of alignment, and with the movable mirror for parallax and a manual zoom lens there's no problem with getting the image right within a certain bounds.
I just don't see any benefit in curved screens now, the content isn't filmed with them in mind, the content generally isn't even theatrically conceived to need a huge screen let alone a curved one, and the screens aren't so big relative to the rooms to where the curve offers a greater screen size than the room naturally could accommodate. So I agree, gimmick.
Yeah but it would be way cheeper to pirate a copy uploaded by someone who rented it and cracked the DRM.
Sure. On the other hand I have a fairly large number of friends that like to see new movies in groups, and often go to the theater together. I just don't care to go to the theater much anymore but I do occasionally host movie nights with the projector and surround sound system anyway, so if this service allows us to pause or to rewind or to otherwise replay then it could be very advantageous. We could do our own movie dinner theatre for a fraction of the cost of going out to the movies, could pause the movie if someone needs more food or to use the bathroom or something, and can do this with high quality while the movie is still essentially new. Could even take this a step further, and do a marathon of the previous films in the series culminating in the new release at the end.
For this to work it has to be priced right and the movie has to come out soon enough. $50 might be too high, and seventeen days might be too long, we'll just have to see though.
Your last point weighs heavy. If the manfuacturers try to follow a true market-will-bear price point for any given moment then they'll find that other players like Embrear might seek to develop competing widebody aircraft, or companies like BAe might fork from Airbus to resume designing and building widebodies independent of Airbus, or even various Russian or Post-Soviet Commonwealth aircraft manufacturers might seek to increase marketshare.
With all of these factors, the market-will-bear price point is probably right where it should be.
Your mentioning China reminded me about their manufacturing and how it relates to their pollution problems.
Manufacturing, especially rote, repeat-times-millions large batch manufacturing is always a perfect role to use robots instead of humans. The first reason China became attractive for manufacturing is the labor costs for unskilled or only moderately skilled workers on assembly lines versus just about everywhere in the West. Second reason, a general lack of rules governing emissions, pollution, and contamination compared to the West. Third reason, very little in the way of overhead due to workplace safety or general safety process rules.
Lately though, China has become painfully aware of both the pollution problems and of the safety problems (remembering that huge port explosion a couple years back as a case in point) and if China works to make inroads for those, and if manufacturers continue to look for ways to reduce the number of workers for a given product, eventually there could come a tipping point where those manufacturers leave China. Where they go will be tough to predict; they might find some second-world or third-world country that lacks environmental or worker protections, or they might look at the costs of doing business in those kinds of places and the costs to ship and actually bring some production, albeit heavily automated, back to their own domestic shores. After all, if it costs $10 to produce a thing in China and $1 to ship it, and if it costs $11 to produce that same thing locally, then there's no reason to bother producing in China anymore.
And a car is only not worth maintaining when a myriad of factors including personal feelings judge it so.
I spent a large portion of my twenties going junkyarding for parts for my various cars. Sometimes I pulled parts of of cars that were arguably in better shape than my own (and no, I couldn't just but the junked car, the junkyards don't usually sell them back whole unless they decided to do so when they initially received them) and had very little really wrong, or if there were big issues, there were plenty of other cars from which to source whole assemblies like transmissions and engines.
A lot of those cars went off the road because the owners were weary of them already, and the repair estimate was the final nail in the coffin.
Do you also stand at the door at parties to offer couples the odds of them remaining together long-term?
Hell, most of the parties I went to, predictions would've been, "Tomorrow morning, tomorrow morning, tomorrow evening, Sunday morning, Tonight at 11:03pm following two minutes of strong apologies..."
There's no such thing as for life. If Tesla wants to bail, they can change their name to Tesla Motors 2 and get out of it.
They could, I won't completely contradict you on that, but in recent history both GM and Chrysler went through bankruptcies essentially launching new companies, but they did not use that as an opportunity to drop warranty promises that they made. Chrylser in particular had offered lifetime warranties on vehicles in the mid Noughties and they still acknowledge their coverage even though this could have been an easy way to get out of commitments to several million vehicles that were far past what a normal warranty periould would be.
If automakers shirk responsibilities like that then it's going to be harder to make sales down the road. Things would have to be pretty dire to back out of commitments like that.
The Indians are chosen because they're currently less expensive than the robots, accounting for the total lifecycle of the robots through all of their various duties down the road.
When the robots are cheaper than the Indians, it's not going to be a matter of a fight, it's going to be saying so-long to the Indians.
If the glass was simply right to the edge that'd be one thing, but now that they're trying to get us to buy phones where the glass wraps around the edge, and this just boggles the mind.
I have a pretty good job, I'm in and out of telecom closets and datacenters on a frequent basis, and even with this reasonably clean work environment I still felt it was a good idea to have a durable phone, as phones can fall off of shelves or ledges, phones can get bumped or have something sat upon them that could crack them or smash them. I expect that most people have jobs that are at least as physical as mine, and many of those are even more so, or else they have their own perils like people whose work has a lot of aircraft travel. If the phone is a work tool in addition to a personal accessory then it would follow that durability and battery longevity should be pretty important characteristics, especially when one thinks about all of the various things that people regularly use their phones for. Task lists. Calendars. Full contacts lists. E-mail. Document reference and light-duty editing. Map route. And that's before we start looking at all of the other things that people have integrated their phone into their lives to help with.
A lot of consumers' preferences for more whiz-bang first, and then more battery life would seem to indicate otherwise.
I did switch from a smaller phone to a larger one. In addition to the battery life and rugged construction I got a larger screen, better built-in audio (don't really need a car-visor bluetooth speakerphone anymore) and all of the modularity (SD, headphone jack, removable battery) that I wanted.
Honestly I would recommend most people consider larger phones.
...essentially what my Kyocera ruggedized phone has...
Phones that have long battery lives are not a new development, but they've not typically been major priority of the most popular cell phone manufacturers. If Samsung, Apple, and to a lesser extent Motorola don't talk about it, no one cares.
One can buy a durable, long-lasting, reliable smartphone. You just have to ignore the marketing hype around the next 0.0.1 version from Apple or Samsung and actually look at what's available. My Kyocera was purchased from my carrier's brick and mortar store, they had it in-stock. Just had to go in and ask, so they took one out of the box so I could play with it, and I bought it.
Yes it can be. You typically have to have achieved a certain level on the tech/engineering/working side before you are even eligible to socialize though, so if you've reached that point then you might have the finances to play.
I've known a couple of people that worked inordinate hours as a reaction to their home life and not wanting to be there.
Unfortunately these people were themselves part of the problem. They tended to be unhappy at work too, and to spread this around the workplace generally.
If Uber is forced to either pay Google to use the tech (which I assume is going to be very expensive) or is forced to abandon and restart development from scratch (which may mean having to essentially form a brand new team of employees since current ones may be unable to participate because of their previous association) then Uber's intentions to switch from their current driver-based model to a driverless model may not be possible. If that's so then it makes me wonder if Uber has any chance of succeeding, since it's pretty clear that their human-driven model is shaky at best. They may not be able to sustain it until they have self-driving tech without raising prices, which means at some point they won't be the better choice, from a consumer point of view, than a conventional taxi.
It is difficult to measure just how much access a given employee needs. It's also difficult to justify restricting access to where the employee must have live VPN access in order to get to data, especially if that employee travels extensively and can use hours and hours in-flight as productive time by having locally stored data.
That's beause Google is learning that it's risky to popular opinion to develop everything in-house, especially when those developments are slapped with your brand. If those developments become somewhat adopted but not enough to be profitable, when they're eventually abandoned and shut down the users get very noisy about it.
Cisco took an alternate approach at some point, they would spin-off employees to help startups, and they would invest in those startups such that they had right of first acquisition. This allowed Cisco to help grow the tech but not under the Cisco brand, so if it didn't work out then the customers of the startup weren't mad at Cisco for creating something that they depend on then shuttering it. If the product takes off then Cisco pulls it marker and buys the company and integrates it.
There is an upside to Google's approach, their integration is arguably a lot better. Cisco's portfolio is loaded with moderately overlapping products and services that do not always mesh well together. If you want to buy in to their gamut of security products you'll end up with so much overlap without enough interoperability that you'll end up with multiple things trying to accomplish the same goals, with performance hits accordingly. Google has less of that.
Slashdot Mirror
That's never going to happen. If you look at bans, you simply end up with black markets that experience varying degrees of violence. By contrast, taxing a product is a way to take an inexpensive product and compel a change in its use. You take that inexpensive product and turn it into an expensive one and generally people will reduce their use of that product even if only to keep the outlay the same.
The three most obvious cases are alcohol with the history of Prohibition, the modern fight against drugs that are defined as controlled substances, and the history of tobacco and cigarettes in particular. The first two were/are abject failures. To stop the violence alcohol had to be re-legalized, and many states are pushing against the illegality of many drugs. Cigarettes by contrast are merely expensive, expensive enough that many people have stopped smoking them even though they remain legal to those old enough.
I'm interested in the life-expectancy prior to the diet switch too.
This is readily apparent in plain nigiri sushi.
The theatrical release, or the Renegade Edition?
If the latter, let me know when and where. I'll bring the laserdisc player and my matted widescreen version meant to show it widescreen on a 4:3 TV. We'll show it via composite video on a native-widescreen and let him or her choose the aspect ratio on the display, but none of them will look right. Zoom will be blocky, stretch will be skewed wide, and 4:3 will be tiny and show overscan and additional black bars on the sides in addition to the top and bottom..
Friends of mine had a very, very early projector TV that had a large box about the size of a dishwasher housing a three-element projector that sat on the floor, with steel square-tubes that led to the wall, where an upright set of steel square-tubes had a curved parabolic screen mounted to them, that at the dead-center was exactly ninety degrees perpendicular to the projector. Even back then, the curve screen was not desirable, it was necessary in order to get the image to look right on a screen the better part of a hundred inches across the diagonal. The three projector elements were not perfectly in-parallax to each other when shining on a flat surface, but the curve of the screen allowed the image to be produced without significant parallax error on the colors.
I admit I was hooked on projectors from that point, but by the time I was able to get a projector for TV, office projectors that didn't need curved screens were readily available. I still have my first one actually, only 800x600 and a dim 300 lumens, but it has optical parallax correction and gets its image through a single LCD, so there are not problems with colors being out of alignment, and with the movable mirror for parallax and a manual zoom lens there's no problem with getting the image right within a certain bounds.
I just don't see any benefit in curved screens now, the content isn't filmed with them in mind, the content generally isn't even theatrically conceived to need a huge screen let alone a curved one, and the screens aren't so big relative to the rooms to where the curve offers a greater screen size than the room naturally could accommodate. So I agree, gimmick.
Yeah but it would be way cheeper to pirate a copy uploaded by someone who rented it and cracked the DRM.
Sure. On the other hand I have a fairly large number of friends that like to see new movies in groups, and often go to the theater together. I just don't care to go to the theater much anymore but I do occasionally host movie nights with the projector and surround sound system anyway, so if this service allows us to pause or to rewind or to otherwise replay then it could be very advantageous. We could do our own movie dinner theatre for a fraction of the cost of going out to the movies, could pause the movie if someone needs more food or to use the bathroom or something, and can do this with high quality while the movie is still essentially new. Could even take this a step further, and do a marathon of the previous films in the series culminating in the new release at the end.
For this to work it has to be priced right and the movie has to come out soon enough. $50 might be too high, and seventeen days might be too long, we'll just have to see though.
What a clever riposte... you have a rapier-wit.
How did they move to China in the first place?
Don't they produce wing components?
Your last point weighs heavy. If the manfuacturers try to follow a true market-will-bear price point for any given moment then they'll find that other players like Embrear might seek to develop competing widebody aircraft, or companies like BAe might fork from Airbus to resume designing and building widebodies independent of Airbus, or even various Russian or Post-Soviet Commonwealth aircraft manufacturers might seek to increase marketshare.
With all of these factors, the market-will-bear price point is probably right where it should be.
but no tacky gold letters
Must not've been a used aircraft formerly of the commander-in-chief's private fleet...
Here I was thinking it would be the cliche of, "I'm sorry, this doesn't happen to me, let me get a tissue..."
Your mentioning China reminded me about their manufacturing and how it relates to their pollution problems.
Manufacturing, especially rote, repeat-times-millions large batch manufacturing is always a perfect role to use robots instead of humans. The first reason China became attractive for manufacturing is the labor costs for unskilled or only moderately skilled workers on assembly lines versus just about everywhere in the West. Second reason, a general lack of rules governing emissions, pollution, and contamination compared to the West. Third reason, very little in the way of overhead due to workplace safety or general safety process rules.
Lately though, China has become painfully aware of both the pollution problems and of the safety problems (remembering that huge port explosion a couple years back as a case in point) and if China works to make inroads for those, and if manufacturers continue to look for ways to reduce the number of workers for a given product, eventually there could come a tipping point where those manufacturers leave China. Where they go will be tough to predict; they might find some second-world or third-world country that lacks environmental or worker protections, or they might look at the costs of doing business in those kinds of places and the costs to ship and actually bring some production, albeit heavily automated, back to their own domestic shores. After all, if it costs $10 to produce a thing in China and $1 to ship it, and if it costs $11 to produce that same thing locally, then there's no reason to bother producing in China anymore.
We'll just have to see.
And a car is only not worth maintaining when a myriad of factors including personal feelings judge it so.
I spent a large portion of my twenties going junkyarding for parts for my various cars. Sometimes I pulled parts of of cars that were arguably in better shape than my own (and no, I couldn't just but the junked car, the junkyards don't usually sell them back whole unless they decided to do so when they initially received them) and had very little really wrong, or if there were big issues, there were plenty of other cars from which to source whole assemblies like transmissions and engines.
A lot of those cars went off the road because the owners were weary of them already, and the repair estimate was the final nail in the coffin.
Do you also stand at the door at parties to offer couples the odds of them remaining together long-term?
Hell, most of the parties I went to, predictions would've been, "Tomorrow morning, tomorrow morning, tomorrow evening, Sunday morning, Tonight at 11:03pm following two minutes of strong apologies..."
There's no such thing as for life. If Tesla wants to bail, they can change their name to Tesla Motors 2 and get out of it.
They could, I won't completely contradict you on that, but in recent history both GM and Chrysler went through bankruptcies essentially launching new companies, but they did not use that as an opportunity to drop warranty promises that they made. Chrylser in particular had offered lifetime warranties on vehicles in the mid Noughties and they still acknowledge their coverage even though this could have been an easy way to get out of commitments to several million vehicles that were far past what a normal warranty periould would be.
If automakers shirk responsibilities like that then it's going to be harder to make sales down the road. Things would have to be pretty dire to back out of commitments like that.
The Indians are chosen because they're currently less expensive than the robots, accounting for the total lifecycle of the robots through all of their various duties down the road.
When the robots are cheaper than the Indians, it's not going to be a matter of a fight, it's going to be saying so-long to the Indians.
If the glass was simply right to the edge that'd be one thing, but now that they're trying to get us to buy phones where the glass wraps around the edge, and this just boggles the mind.
I have a pretty good job, I'm in and out of telecom closets and datacenters on a frequent basis, and even with this reasonably clean work environment I still felt it was a good idea to have a durable phone, as phones can fall off of shelves or ledges, phones can get bumped or have something sat upon them that could crack them or smash them. I expect that most people have jobs that are at least as physical as mine, and many of those are even more so, or else they have their own perils like people whose work has a lot of aircraft travel. If the phone is a work tool in addition to a personal accessory then it would follow that durability and battery longevity should be pretty important characteristics, especially when one thinks about all of the various things that people regularly use their phones for. Task lists. Calendars. Full contacts lists. E-mail. Document reference and light-duty editing. Map route. And that's before we start looking at all of the other things that people have integrated their phone into their lives to help with.
A lot of consumers' preferences for more whiz-bang first, and then more battery life would seem to indicate otherwise.
I did switch from a smaller phone to a larger one. In addition to the battery life and rugged construction I got a larger screen, better built-in audio (don't really need a car-visor bluetooth speakerphone anymore) and all of the modularity (SD, headphone jack, removable battery) that I wanted.
Honestly I would recommend most people consider larger phones.
...essentially what my Kyocera ruggedized phone has...
Phones that have long battery lives are not a new development, but they've not typically been major priority of the most popular cell phone manufacturers. If Samsung, Apple, and to a lesser extent Motorola don't talk about it, no one cares.
One can buy a durable, long-lasting, reliable smartphone. You just have to ignore the marketing hype around the next 0.0.1 version from Apple or Samsung and actually look at what's available. My Kyocera was purchased from my carrier's brick and mortar store, they had it in-stock. Just had to go in and ask, so they took one out of the box so I could play with it, and I bought it.
Yes it can be. You typically have to have achieved a certain level on the tech/engineering/working side before you are even eligible to socialize though, so if you've reached that point then you might have the finances to play.
I've known a couple of people that worked inordinate hours as a reaction to their home life and not wanting to be there.
Unfortunately these people were themselves part of the problem. They tended to be unhappy at work too, and to spread this around the workplace generally.
Probably over the next several years actually.
If Uber is forced to either pay Google to use the tech (which I assume is going to be very expensive) or is forced to abandon and restart development from scratch (which may mean having to essentially form a brand new team of employees since current ones may be unable to participate because of their previous association) then Uber's intentions to switch from their current driver-based model to a driverless model may not be possible. If that's so then it makes me wonder if Uber has any chance of succeeding, since it's pretty clear that their human-driven model is shaky at best. They may not be able to sustain it until they have self-driving tech without raising prices, which means at some point they won't be the better choice, from a consumer point of view, than a conventional taxi.
It is difficult to measure just how much access a given employee needs. It's also difficult to justify restricting access to where the employee must have live VPN access in order to get to data, especially if that employee travels extensively and can use hours and hours in-flight as productive time by having locally stored data.
That's beause Google is learning that it's risky to popular opinion to develop everything in-house, especially when those developments are slapped with your brand. If those developments become somewhat adopted but not enough to be profitable, when they're eventually abandoned and shut down the users get very noisy about it.
Cisco took an alternate approach at some point, they would spin-off employees to help startups, and they would invest in those startups such that they had right of first acquisition. This allowed Cisco to help grow the tech but not under the Cisco brand, so if it didn't work out then the customers of the startup weren't mad at Cisco for creating something that they depend on then shuttering it. If the product takes off then Cisco pulls it marker and buys the company and integrates it.
There is an upside to Google's approach, their integration is arguably a lot better. Cisco's portfolio is loaded with moderately overlapping products and services that do not always mesh well together. If you want to buy in to their gamut of security products you'll end up with so much overlap without enough interoperability that you'll end up with multiple things trying to accomplish the same goals, with performance hits accordingly. Google has less of that.