When I was in Junior High we had two classes that were paired for the year, the first was "Computers", and the second was, "Technology". As this was before most households had computers in the home, in Computers we learned how to use a GUI operating system (Macintosh LC platform if memory serves), what a word processor did, what a spreadsheet did, how rudimentary object drawing software (ie, not the kind with pixel-by-pixel manipulation) worked, how to make presentation slides, etc. This was designed to get us ready to do term papers, to do a very simple amount of math for either science class data processing or to prepare us for higher-level math, and how to create presentations so if we did class presentations we could use technology to do so.
In Technology, we used computers for other goals. We had a stress-analyser that would crush things and give us plots of the way the item being crushed performed. We had software that we could use to mimic drag coefficient testing over a 2d representation of a car body. We had access to a wide-carriage plotter. We had the kids programming language "LOGO" to use to do vector manipulation of a cursor called the Turtle. We had plenty of non-computer-based things like a pneumatic kit to build simple pneumatic circuits and pneumatic machines, we had model rockets, we had to build a bridge to handle so much weight, we had to build something to make an egg survive drops from height using only cardboard and paper and glue.
The term "Computer Science" wasn't part of the curriculum until high school, where we knuckled down and started playing with C.
The biggest problem with trying to do this kind of thing for all kids and for multiple years at younger and younger ages boils down to two things- cost, and the allocation of classroom time. If there are six available hour-long periods in the day for possible instruction, and two classes (ie Computers versus Technology) at the same time, with 30 kids each, then that's 30*2*6, or 360 seats available at a maximum, or 180 per teacher. In reality teachers usually have down around 120 to 140 students spread across five class periods, as they need prep and lunch and time to deal with other things, which brings it down to 240-280 per year. Then you have all of the money to spend to equip and to maintain the learning labs and the staffing costs for that maintenance.
Most of the schools that I attended had far, FAR more than 360 students. The JHS and HS campuses had 500 students per grade level, and the elementaries had probably 120-150 kids per grade. These kinds of opportunities were not offered until Junior High simply because it was not possible to put every child through these kinds of classes, so they became electives that the student could choose to sign up for once the educational model meant that students changed teachers every hour already; in the elementary model where students generally remain with the same teacher for the whole day other than one-hour-a-day changesups to once-a-week classes for music, or for art, or for computer lab, or library, or for a lab-type of science it's really not practical to give the kids enough exposure to actually develop a curriculum around the material. Kids would have to have time every day or nearly every day for it to really work, and since the educational model at all levels is to provide as much education for as little cost as possible, this simply isn't going to happen in public schools.
Exposure to tech is generally a good thing, but unfortunately it costs money, a lot of money, and not everyone wants to have the same amount of exposure or can even benefit with the same amount of exposure. That's why concentrating on fundamentals as young children and reserving that specialized training for a little later makes more sense. I would rather see things like logic being taught, which can be irrespective of a computer, when kids are younger, so that when they do get use of the software on a computer they already have mastery of the basics, along the lines of how we don't let kids use calculators for basic arithmetic until they're studying a higher discipline of math like Trig or Calculus, where the calculator is only assisting in making the rote basic math happen faster.
So, to confirm this, and yes, I know, I'm oversimplifying...
They're essentially reusing the steel cylinder. Presumably they strip it, media-blast it to remove all traces of its previous use down to bare metal, inspect it with sonic or magnaflux or X-ray or pressure test, along the way somewhere confirming its dimensions are still within spec and haven't ballooned due to use, then if it passes, clean again and build it in a similar fashion to if it had been a new steel cylinder being built as a rocket motor...
Don't get me wrong, it's not cheap to build a new steel cylinder capable of handling the pressures that the SRBs take, but if my assumptions about the reuse procedures are even somewhat in the ballpark it's more like recycling than a simple reuse. It saves money, but it's not a simple matter of recovering the spent SRBs from the ocean, checking a few things, buffing the paint and repainting anything that needs it, and casting a new propellant grain into them.
I'm assuming that SpaceX's goal is to collect the landed rocket, clean it, run diagnostics on its active systems, perform some materials tests at places that are known to have suffered load like where the legs attach and at the endcaps where the thrust pressures are highest, touch-up the paint, fill it with its liquid fuel again, and launch it again, possibly all at the same spaceport.
How many parts were used though? Did they limit reuse to just the structural connecting assembly that attached the SRB to the liquid tank, which presumably was a very durable, very hard, very corrosion-resistant part, or did they ship the segments back to Thiokol to get refurbished into fueled segments to then ship back to Florida for use?
Just a guess, but they probably don't consider a splashdown-landed rocket viable to be relaunched, or that the refurbishment costs of a rocket that has been immersed-in and possibly flooded-by seawater is too high to justify doing that over building a new one.
This argument was made back when the Shuttle Program SRBs were ocean-landed and recovered, if I remember right they were never reflown either.
I wouldn't be surprised if part of her change in appearance part of a coping mechanism of Ms. Cuoco's subsequent to her separation and pending divorce. It's not uncommon for someone leaving negative circumstances where they might have had less control over their personal affairs to make changes simply because they are now free to do so even if those changes are largely superficial, especially if the individual was trying to be a certain way specifically to please the partner that they've now left.
Regarding those that have dated Kaley Cuoco, it's kind of funny looking at Johnny Galecki. He dated Sara Gilbert while playing her boyfriend on Rosanne before she came to terms with her homosexuality and as a guest-star he kissed Mayim Bialik on Blossom once. The only woman that's been a formal series regular on BBT that he didn't have a romantic scene with is Michelle Rauch.
I've had to work extensively with service provider telecom workers over the years, and one of the things that I've noticed that might make it harder to get union efforts going are that many workers were happy to rack-up the OT instead of the company hiring an appropriate-sized workforce. We were doing 2nd shift projects and many of the service provider workers brought in to do the equipment swap and patching had already worked a full shift during the first shift before putting in five to eight hours with us second shift. A lot of these telecom workers were much closer to retirement than they were to the beginnings of their careers too, we joked that with the eight guys we had 300 years of combined telecom experience; depending on how the retirement system was set-up for contributions or how much they could bank through the extra hours it could be beneficial once they stopped working. These guys were probably personally making $50-$60/hr working with us with the OT.
And that can be the trouble with reasonably well-paying jobs; it's often good for everyone in the group in some senses if they're organized and if being organized forces things like protecting employees' time off, but it can also be good for the individual employee in other senses if they can get perks that might not be an option if the union were operating in strength. It's always a tradeoff.
Why wouldn't there be repair if a battery bank goes? Do you throw away your laptop, or your battery-operated power tools, or your cell phone, or your flashlight, when the battery quits? Even hard-to-replace batteries like in modern tablets or in Apple phones are still changed when they die, and those are devices in the hundreds-of-dollars price range, not in the tens-of-thousands price range. Batteries in electric cars will be replaced probably in the same quantities that engines or transmissions are replaced in conventional cars.
As for their place, probably 80% of the population could use an electric car without a rapid-charge system for nearly everything they do now so long as the car has a 150 mile range. 150 miles is about half a tank's worth of fuel in a conventional car. Sure, people in rural areas, people that regularly drive more than that per day, and people who potentially need to drive more than that wouldn't be a good fit, but for most of us, that would get us to work and to home and to errands and other around-town driving without having to recharge. As for those very few times when someone needs more than that, given that people already rent cars for vacations or rent pickup trucks or vans when they need to move things that won't fit in their cars, there's already an infrastructure ready to handle it for them.
With only one Nancy Drew, but two Hardy Boys plus Drew's ostensible boyfriend Ned Nickerson, even without the title you're already a good part of the way there...
Something must be done. Maybe this is the right fix.
After we fix that we can go on to eliminating vertical videos.
I don't get why cell phone manufacturers don't have a feature to record a proper horizontal video while holding the phone vertically. These phones have 10 Megapixel cameras in them now. It shouldn't be that difficult to grab the center 1920 by 1080 out of a much larger field for video.
I see one advantage that it has- if the medium literally remains text then it's completely portable, doesn't matter if people are getting messages e-mailed, if they're reading them in an old usenet or forums method or even a graffiti-wall method, if they're getting them by MMS message, or even if they're still looking at them through a web browser, plus it might allow for the messages to pass to other kinds of devices as well. One could have a television display twits as a very simple subroutine instead of having a full browser running, for example, or they could show up on a summarized RSS feed on a cell phone's background or screensaver without having to do anything.
But that doesn't seem to be how the userbase is actually using Twitter.
I was sending messages up to 10K characters on the (then arpanet) as early as 1984. Beat them to the ability to exceed 140 characters by 32 years!
Seriously, I never got the appeal of this 140 character thing. It seems like that creates pressure in the direction of thought-free trivialities rather than meaningful depth of communication.
Captcha: Capacity.
As a Fidonet user from back in the BBS days I can sympathize...
It's almost like the 140-character limit was a holdout from the TAP paging protocol. I had an alphapager for work and later got one for myself before I could afford a cell phone, it was a very convenient medium if one was mindful of the character limits.
It also reminds me of that Doctor Who episode in the current era of the show where they ended up in the alternate universe and first met the Cybermen- I wonder if the Twitter founders thought that tweets would be used like the daily data-dump that Cybus Industries sent out, where popular twits would send out messages that would cause large numbers of people to pause, look at their phones, chuckle, and then continue on with their day. What we seem to have in reality is a small core of diehard users (both as posters and as recipients) and the vast majority of us only pay attention when the TV media people tell us what some celebrity has tweeted or what's trending. I don't think that most of us give a damn, and now that they're removing the character cap it's likely that they've maxed out their userbase and are struggling to find ways of attracting more users.
I guess that's the thing.
The car-industry knows that with electric cards there will be much less for them to do and sell after they have sold the car so they need new business.
There will be fewer things that need regular maintenance in the first hundred-thousand miles absolutely, but there will still be cases for both repair and maintenance even in a simple electric car. Given the possibility of greater longevity there might be actual grease fittings on the suspension, to make the ball joints and tie rod ends last longer. There will be fluid top-offs for consumable fluids like windshield washer fluid. There will be tires and brake pads and rotors. There might even be greasing mechanisms for electric motor bearings to refill, and possibly even transmission fluid to change if the manufacturer attempts to run the electric motor in an efficient RPM at every possible speed.
There won't be engine oil, or engine air filter, or plugs, or wires, or distributor caps/rotors, or fuel injectors/filters/pumps. There won't be engine coolant or thermostats. There probably won't be hydraulic-assist steering or belt-driven HVAC and without engine coolant, the cabin temperature control will probably use sealed electric heatpumps with reverser valves that operate like a residential heatpump for both cold and hot. One thing eventually there will definitely be though, will be motor controller service. I fully expect motor controllers to burn out or have problems and require repair That and the wiring for the batteries, which we've already seen in Priuses as a problem.
I expect that the carwash will become a more prominent service center. They'll not only wash the car and vacuum the inside, but will top-off the air in the tires, top-off the windshield washer fluid, perform chassis lubes if they're needed, and change cabin air filters if equipped. They could even expand into brakes, but that might be more a function of the tire shop and with regen braking cars might go longer between pads and turning rotors.
So dealerships that fail to migrate to the model of doing this kind of service may fail. Usually the service department actually pays for the dealership's operations, the sale of cars is just icing on the cake. This might be more difficult as cars might both not need as much maintenance and might operate for more miles before being end-of-life than current offerings.
First off, the entire idea of having a screen like that in any seat the driver can see is fucking idiotic and will cause crashes.
Automakers have really jumped the shark. Control surfaces used to be basically entirely tactile once one learned the basic layout, one could operate all of the usual features without looking at them. One could change the HVAC settings, the radio station, next/back on the CD, control the heated seats, set the cruise control, operate all of the accessories without looking at them once once was familiar enough with them. Now, with touchscreens, there are no longer unique-feeling buttons to become accustomed to. One has to take one's eyes off of the road in order to change music or to set the HVAC controls.
This is completely insane. We wouldn't need so much lane-monitoring or collision-avoidance technology if people weren't forced to multitask on a computer in order to drive a car. Visual user interfaces beyond the passive feedback of speed, RPM, and characteristics of mechanical performance should be secondary, not primary. Primary should involve touch or speech to provide input and should use audio playback as the primary means of prompt or acknowledgement for all non-driving tasks that the car is capable of doing.
My car plays a tone if I've left the keys in with the engine off or if I've left the lights on with the engine off when I open my door. My car plays a tone when the turn signal or the hazard lights operate. This particular car plays a tone if I've driven more than a quarter-mile with my turn signal operating. Some cars play tones if the speed exceeds a certain amount without seatbelts on, or if the gauges read too far out of tolerance, or if it activates an idiot-light, or if one tries to drive with a door not fully closed. I've even seen a few like a buddy's older Grand Cherokee that alerts the driver if it detects that an exterior lamp's bulb is not working. These indicators don't take a whole lot of the driver's attention while they're driving compared to having screens to read.
If only we could apply this to other works too...
I'd love it if all copies of The Communist Manifesto came pre-Fisked. It would help people from getting confused their first year in college.
Nothing helps freshmen from getting confused in their first year in college. Take away one source of confusion and plenty of others will take its place.
Why would he be considered more than an editor at best? It is not The Diary of Otto Frank, or The Diary of Anne Frank and her father Otto Frank, it is The Diary of Anne Frank. He may have censored some of her adolescent sexual thoughts, but he didn't create any new content for the diary, he only removed existing.
I do think it's kind of funny that the automotive industry seems to have a better altruism record on intellectual property than the IT industry. It's also interesting that the auto companies, at least the historically-American ones, have been more apt to selling or spinning-off their non-automotive components when times get tough, even if those units are profitable or show a degree of potential for it. The financing banks come to mind.
It's like they actually want to make cars and trucks instead of diversifying.
Yeah, I can only think of a couple of instances when patents were essentially opened to everyone, both of them automotive. The first was when Volvo invented the three-point seatbelt, patented it, and then declared that everyone could use it because they felt it was a moral obligation to reduce automobile crash deaths. The second more recent example was when Tesla announced that its patents would be free to use. I'm mildly on the fence if that will hold out or not. The seatbelt was a fairly simple device compared to the large numbers of devices covered in Tesla's patents.
If Khan Academy is seeking this patent in order to prevent someone else from patenting it, they need to do something to release the patent as something like the public domain or else a license along the lines of GPL. Otherwise everyone would need to individually strike agreements with Khan Academy to ensure that they're not later going to be sued.
The submitter didn't clear anything up with that line. If I understand it right, FreeBSD is based on BSD UNIX's code. BSD UNIX was the university fork from Bell's UNIX at a time when the vast majority of the code in Bell's codebase at the time of the fork was university-submitted work, and that the BSD fork was possible because a relatively little amount of sourcecode had to be rewritten to create the independent fork.
Even if I have some of the details wrong, FreeBSD is still considered to be a UNIX-derivative, unlike how Linux is a UNIX-like operating system.
You're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, and you're confusing geeks with fandom. There have been participants in fandom since the idea started that absolutely could not participate in a technical discussion or even keep the facts of their particular favorite franchise straight. Those aren't the people that are remembered, but they've always been there. If anything they're necessary for fandom as their dollars ultimately fund all of the events including the discussion panels that they don't participate in.
Even cosplay is not a new phenomenon. It used to be called the masquerade. It had its share of badly made costumes, excellently-made costumes, and slutty costumes that modern cosplay has. It simply didn't have the Internet as a medium in which to record it for posterity, there were few if any professional costumers because it wasn't marketed like it is now.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in Junior High we had two classes that were paired for the year, the first was "Computers", and the second was, "Technology". As this was before most households had computers in the home, in Computers we learned how to use a GUI operating system (Macintosh LC platform if memory serves), what a word processor did, what a spreadsheet did, how rudimentary object drawing software (ie, not the kind with pixel-by-pixel manipulation) worked, how to make presentation slides, etc. This was designed to get us ready to do term papers, to do a very simple amount of math for either science class data processing or to prepare us for higher-level math, and how to create presentations so if we did class presentations we could use technology to do so.
In Technology, we used computers for other goals. We had a stress-analyser that would crush things and give us plots of the way the item being crushed performed. We had software that we could use to mimic drag coefficient testing over a 2d representation of a car body. We had access to a wide-carriage plotter. We had the kids programming language "LOGO" to use to do vector manipulation of a cursor called the Turtle. We had plenty of non-computer-based things like a pneumatic kit to build simple pneumatic circuits and pneumatic machines, we had model rockets, we had to build a bridge to handle so much weight, we had to build something to make an egg survive drops from height using only cardboard and paper and glue.
The term "Computer Science" wasn't part of the curriculum until high school, where we knuckled down and started playing with C.
The biggest problem with trying to do this kind of thing for all kids and for multiple years at younger and younger ages boils down to two things- cost, and the allocation of classroom time. If there are six available hour-long periods in the day for possible instruction, and two classes (ie Computers versus Technology) at the same time, with 30 kids each, then that's 30*2*6, or 360 seats available at a maximum, or 180 per teacher. In reality teachers usually have down around 120 to 140 students spread across five class periods, as they need prep and lunch and time to deal with other things, which brings it down to 240-280 per year. Then you have all of the money to spend to equip and to maintain the learning labs and the staffing costs for that maintenance.
Most of the schools that I attended had far, FAR more than 360 students. The JHS and HS campuses had 500 students per grade level, and the elementaries had probably 120-150 kids per grade. These kinds of opportunities were not offered until Junior High simply because it was not possible to put every child through these kinds of classes, so they became electives that the student could choose to sign up for once the educational model meant that students changed teachers every hour already; in the elementary model where students generally remain with the same teacher for the whole day other than one-hour-a-day changesups to once-a-week classes for music, or for art, or for computer lab, or library, or for a lab-type of science it's really not practical to give the kids enough exposure to actually develop a curriculum around the material. Kids would have to have time every day or nearly every day for it to really work, and since the educational model at all levels is to provide as much education for as little cost as possible, this simply isn't going to happen in public schools.
Exposure to tech is generally a good thing, but unfortunately it costs money, a lot of money, and not everyone wants to have the same amount of exposure or can even benefit with the same amount of exposure. That's why concentrating on fundamentals as young children and reserving that specialized training for a little later makes more sense. I would rather see things like logic being taught, which can be irrespective of a computer, when kids are younger, so that when they do get use of the software on a computer they already have mastery of the basics, along the lines of how we don't let kids use calculators for basic arithmetic until they're studying a higher discipline of math like Trig or Calculus, where the calculator is only assisting in making the rote basic math happen faster.
So, to confirm this, and yes, I know, I'm oversimplifying...
They're essentially reusing the steel cylinder. Presumably they strip it, media-blast it to remove all traces of its previous use down to bare metal, inspect it with sonic or magnaflux or X-ray or pressure test, along the way somewhere confirming its dimensions are still within spec and haven't ballooned due to use, then if it passes, clean again and build it in a similar fashion to if it had been a new steel cylinder being built as a rocket motor...
Don't get me wrong, it's not cheap to build a new steel cylinder capable of handling the pressures that the SRBs take, but if my assumptions about the reuse procedures are even somewhat in the ballpark it's more like recycling than a simple reuse. It saves money, but it's not a simple matter of recovering the spent SRBs from the ocean, checking a few things, buffing the paint and repainting anything that needs it, and casting a new propellant grain into them.
I'm assuming that SpaceX's goal is to collect the landed rocket, clean it, run diagnostics on its active systems, perform some materials tests at places that are known to have suffered load like where the legs attach and at the endcaps where the thrust pressures are highest, touch-up the paint, fill it with its liquid fuel again, and launch it again, possibly all at the same spaceport.
How many parts were used though? Did they limit reuse to just the structural connecting assembly that attached the SRB to the liquid tank, which presumably was a very durable, very hard, very corrosion-resistant part, or did they ship the segments back to Thiokol to get refurbished into fueled segments to then ship back to Florida for use?
Whachyou talking about? Willis?
Just a guess, but they probably don't consider a splashdown-landed rocket viable to be relaunched, or that the refurbishment costs of a rocket that has been immersed-in and possibly flooded-by seawater is too high to justify doing that over building a new one.
This argument was made back when the Shuttle Program SRBs were ocean-landed and recovered, if I remember right they were never reflown either.
...has become Musk's secret hideout down in Baja?
Makes me wonder if his wife is going to play Tiffany Case in the remake of Diamonds are Forever...
These telecom workers were hourly.
I wouldn't be surprised if part of her change in appearance part of a coping mechanism of Ms. Cuoco's subsequent to her separation and pending divorce. It's not uncommon for someone leaving negative circumstances where they might have had less control over their personal affairs to make changes simply because they are now free to do so even if those changes are largely superficial, especially if the individual was trying to be a certain way specifically to please the partner that they've now left.
Regarding those that have dated Kaley Cuoco, it's kind of funny looking at Johnny Galecki. He dated Sara Gilbert while playing her boyfriend on Rosanne before she came to terms with her homosexuality and as a guest-star he kissed Mayim Bialik on Blossom once. The only woman that's been a formal series regular on BBT that he didn't have a romantic scene with is Michelle Rauch.
I've had to work extensively with service provider telecom workers over the years, and one of the things that I've noticed that might make it harder to get union efforts going are that many workers were happy to rack-up the OT instead of the company hiring an appropriate-sized workforce. We were doing 2nd shift projects and many of the service provider workers brought in to do the equipment swap and patching had already worked a full shift during the first shift before putting in five to eight hours with us second shift. A lot of these telecom workers were much closer to retirement than they were to the beginnings of their careers too, we joked that with the eight guys we had 300 years of combined telecom experience; depending on how the retirement system was set-up for contributions or how much they could bank through the extra hours it could be beneficial once they stopped working. These guys were probably personally making $50-$60/hr working with us with the OT.
And that can be the trouble with reasonably well-paying jobs; it's often good for everyone in the group in some senses if they're organized and if being organized forces things like protecting employees' time off, but it can also be good for the individual employee in other senses if they can get perks that might not be an option if the union were operating in strength. It's always a tradeoff.
Why wouldn't there be repair if a battery bank goes? Do you throw away your laptop, or your battery-operated power tools, or your cell phone, or your flashlight, when the battery quits? Even hard-to-replace batteries like in modern tablets or in Apple phones are still changed when they die, and those are devices in the hundreds-of-dollars price range, not in the tens-of-thousands price range. Batteries in electric cars will be replaced probably in the same quantities that engines or transmissions are replaced in conventional cars.
As for their place, probably 80% of the population could use an electric car without a rapid-charge system for nearly everything they do now so long as the car has a 150 mile range. 150 miles is about half a tank's worth of fuel in a conventional car. Sure, people in rural areas, people that regularly drive more than that per day, and people who potentially need to drive more than that wouldn't be a good fit, but for most of us, that would get us to work and to home and to errands and other around-town driving without having to recharge. As for those very few times when someone needs more than that, given that people already rent cars for vacations or rent pickup trucks or vans when they need to move things that won't fit in their cars, there's already an infrastructure ready to handle it for them.
With only one Nancy Drew, but two Hardy Boys plus Drew's ostensible boyfriend Ned Nickerson, even without the title you're already a good part of the way there...
So it's like Vanilla Ice?
Something must be done. Maybe this is the right fix.
After we fix that we can go on to eliminating vertical videos.
I don't get why cell phone manufacturers don't have a feature to record a proper horizontal video while holding the phone vertically. These phones have 10 Megapixel cameras in them now. It shouldn't be that difficult to grab the center 1920 by 1080 out of a much larger field for video.
I see one advantage that it has- if the medium literally remains text then it's completely portable, doesn't matter if people are getting messages e-mailed, if they're reading them in an old usenet or forums method or even a graffiti-wall method, if they're getting them by MMS message, or even if they're still looking at them through a web browser, plus it might allow for the messages to pass to other kinds of devices as well. One could have a television display twits as a very simple subroutine instead of having a full browser running, for example, or they could show up on a summarized RSS feed on a cell phone's background or screensaver without having to do anything.
But that doesn't seem to be how the userbase is actually using Twitter.
I was sending messages up to 10K characters on the (then arpanet) as early as 1984. Beat them to the ability to exceed 140 characters by 32 years!
Seriously, I never got the appeal of this 140 character thing. It seems like that creates pressure in the direction of thought-free trivialities rather than meaningful depth of communication.
Captcha: Capacity.
As a Fidonet user from back in the BBS days I can sympathize...
It's almost like the 140-character limit was a holdout from the TAP paging protocol. I had an alphapager for work and later got one for myself before I could afford a cell phone, it was a very convenient medium if one was mindful of the character limits.
It also reminds me of that Doctor Who episode in the current era of the show where they ended up in the alternate universe and first met the Cybermen- I wonder if the Twitter founders thought that tweets would be used like the daily data-dump that Cybus Industries sent out, where popular twits would send out messages that would cause large numbers of people to pause, look at their phones, chuckle, and then continue on with their day. What we seem to have in reality is a small core of diehard users (both as posters and as recipients) and the vast majority of us only pay attention when the TV media people tell us what some celebrity has tweeted or what's trending. I don't think that most of us give a damn, and now that they're removing the character cap it's likely that they've maxed out their userbase and are struggling to find ways of attracting more users.
I guess that's the thing. The car-industry knows that with electric cards there will be much less for them to do and sell after they have sold the car so they need new business.
There will be fewer things that need regular maintenance in the first hundred-thousand miles absolutely, but there will still be cases for both repair and maintenance even in a simple electric car. Given the possibility of greater longevity there might be actual grease fittings on the suspension, to make the ball joints and tie rod ends last longer. There will be fluid top-offs for consumable fluids like windshield washer fluid. There will be tires and brake pads and rotors. There might even be greasing mechanisms for electric motor bearings to refill, and possibly even transmission fluid to change if the manufacturer attempts to run the electric motor in an efficient RPM at every possible speed.
There won't be engine oil, or engine air filter, or plugs, or wires, or distributor caps/rotors, or fuel injectors/filters/pumps. There won't be engine coolant or thermostats. There probably won't be hydraulic-assist steering or belt-driven HVAC and without engine coolant, the cabin temperature control will probably use sealed electric heatpumps with reverser valves that operate like a residential heatpump for both cold and hot. One thing eventually there will definitely be though, will be motor controller service. I fully expect motor controllers to burn out or have problems and require repair That and the wiring for the batteries, which we've already seen in Priuses as a problem.
I expect that the carwash will become a more prominent service center. They'll not only wash the car and vacuum the inside, but will top-off the air in the tires, top-off the windshield washer fluid, perform chassis lubes if they're needed, and change cabin air filters if equipped. They could even expand into brakes, but that might be more a function of the tire shop and with regen braking cars might go longer between pads and turning rotors.
So dealerships that fail to migrate to the model of doing this kind of service may fail. Usually the service department actually pays for the dealership's operations, the sale of cars is just icing on the cake. This might be more difficult as cars might both not need as much maintenance and might operate for more miles before being end-of-life than current offerings.
First off, the entire idea of having a screen like that in any seat the driver can see is fucking idiotic and will cause crashes.
Automakers have really jumped the shark. Control surfaces used to be basically entirely tactile once one learned the basic layout, one could operate all of the usual features without looking at them. One could change the HVAC settings, the radio station, next/back on the CD, control the heated seats, set the cruise control, operate all of the accessories without looking at them once once was familiar enough with them. Now, with touchscreens, there are no longer unique-feeling buttons to become accustomed to. One has to take one's eyes off of the road in order to change music or to set the HVAC controls.
This is completely insane. We wouldn't need so much lane-monitoring or collision-avoidance technology if people weren't forced to multitask on a computer in order to drive a car. Visual user interfaces beyond the passive feedback of speed, RPM, and characteristics of mechanical performance should be secondary, not primary. Primary should involve touch or speech to provide input and should use audio playback as the primary means of prompt or acknowledgement for all non-driving tasks that the car is capable of doing.
My car plays a tone if I've left the keys in with the engine off or if I've left the lights on with the engine off when I open my door. My car plays a tone when the turn signal or the hazard lights operate. This particular car plays a tone if I've driven more than a quarter-mile with my turn signal operating. Some cars play tones if the speed exceeds a certain amount without seatbelts on, or if the gauges read too far out of tolerance, or if it activates an idiot-light, or if one tries to drive with a door not fully closed. I've even seen a few like a buddy's older Grand Cherokee that alerts the driver if it detects that an exterior lamp's bulb is not working. These indicators don't take a whole lot of the driver's attention while they're driving compared to having screens to read.
Now Disney can make an animated movie of it.
"SPRINGtime... for HITler... and GEEeeermanyyyyyyyyyy! WINter, for POLand... and FraaAAAaaance!"
If only we could apply this to other works too... I'd love it if all copies of The Communist Manifesto came pre-Fisked. It would help people from getting confused their first year in college.
Nothing helps freshmen from getting confused in their first year in college. Take away one source of confusion and plenty of others will take its place.
Why would he be considered more than an editor at best? It is not The Diary of Otto Frank, or The Diary of Anne Frank and her father Otto Frank, it is The Diary of Anne Frank. He may have censored some of her adolescent sexual thoughts, but he didn't create any new content for the diary, he only removed existing.
I do think it's kind of funny that the automotive industry seems to have a better altruism record on intellectual property than the IT industry. It's also interesting that the auto companies, at least the historically-American ones, have been more apt to selling or spinning-off their non-automotive components when times get tough, even if those units are profitable or show a degree of potential for it. The financing banks come to mind.
It's like they actually want to make cars and trucks instead of diversifying.
Yeah, I can only think of a couple of instances when patents were essentially opened to everyone, both of them automotive. The first was when Volvo invented the three-point seatbelt, patented it, and then declared that everyone could use it because they felt it was a moral obligation to reduce automobile crash deaths. The second more recent example was when Tesla announced that its patents would be free to use. I'm mildly on the fence if that will hold out or not. The seatbelt was a fairly simple device compared to the large numbers of devices covered in Tesla's patents.
If Khan Academy is seeking this patent in order to prevent someone else from patenting it, they need to do something to release the patent as something like the public domain or else a license along the lines of GPL. Otherwise everyone would need to individually strike agreements with Khan Academy to ensure that they're not later going to be sued.
The submitter didn't clear anything up with that line. If I understand it right, FreeBSD is based on BSD UNIX's code. BSD UNIX was the university fork from Bell's UNIX at a time when the vast majority of the code in Bell's codebase at the time of the fork was university-submitted work, and that the BSD fork was possible because a relatively little amount of sourcecode had to be rewritten to create the independent fork.
Even if I have some of the details wrong, FreeBSD is still considered to be a UNIX-derivative, unlike how Linux is a UNIX-like operating system.
You're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, and you're confusing geeks with fandom. There have been participants in fandom since the idea started that absolutely could not participate in a technical discussion or even keep the facts of their particular favorite franchise straight. Those aren't the people that are remembered, but they've always been there. If anything they're necessary for fandom as their dollars ultimately fund all of the events including the discussion panels that they don't participate in.
Even cosplay is not a new phenomenon. It used to be called the masquerade. It had its share of badly made costumes, excellently-made costumes, and slutty costumes that modern cosplay has. It simply didn't have the Internet as a medium in which to record it for posterity, there were few if any professional costumers because it wasn't marketed like it is now.
Not all science fiction requires the explanation of technology. Campbellian sci-fi does, but most dystopian sci-fi is about setting and theme.
Additionally, fantasy as a genre is also popular among geeks.