For those of you who don't live in Arizona, the Forest Service mandated a certain percentage of permanent road closures in the state. Coconino (basically between I-40 and the Grand Canyon) decided to close down 80% of the roads. Yes, eight zero percent. But here's the catch: They don't physically block off the roads. You're supposed to know which roads are open and which aren't and if they find you on a closed road they can fine you. State Game & Fish and the Sheriff's Offices have already said that they aren't going to enforce this crap. Oh, and search & rescue operations aren't exempt from these rules. Hell, a local search dog unit wanted to hold a national conference and do some training in the forest. The Forest Service demanded an environmental impact study be done. What the hell are they worried about? Dog poop? How is that any different from coyote poop?
It's part of current business models. Notice how many "products" you use that you don't just buy once but rather require you to pay a monthly fee and one that appears to be inexpensive but turns out to cost a crapload of money over the long term. And how many "products" do you pay for every month whether you use them or not. (I smell a Slashdot poll) We're rapidly falling into the gravity well of not actually owning anything. Now take a look at the TV ads for the Capital One Venture card that claims to have no blackout dates or limited seating and woohoo! double miles. What they don't tell you is that they give you a very low credit limit so that it takes two to four times as long to get one of these free flights. There is ALWAYS a catch somewhere. The consumer rarely, if ever, gets everything they were promised. I, myself, have started writing the install date with a Sharpie on every bulb I put in so I have some real-world idea of lifespan. "Oh, it'll last 5000 hours...under normal use." What the hell is normal use? "Normal" is not a standardized unit of measure despite the implied definition. Light bulb manufacturing is ultimately a business not a love affair. If they made a bulb that lasted for 10 years "under normal use" and charged the same as an older technology that only lasted a year, that company would find itself out of business. This is also why Wonka's everlasting gob stopper will lose money, too. All joking aside, this is also why home solar panels are more of a scam than anything at this point. Lots of people don't know that they have a limited lifespan and gradually lose their efficiency yet the companies snow people into thinking that they're going to make money by selling energy back to the power company. Maybe. After losing money for 3/4 of the panels' lifespan. It's mostly smoke and mirrors. Oh, and you need to pay an environmental impact fee for the smoke and are required by law to recycle the mirrors at your expense.
If this guy is so smart on the subject of aging, why not set the limit at 65? On the plus side, Social Security and Medicare would go away. And if this guy is so eager to drop dead at 75, why not right now? Go ahead, buddy. I have the same feeling towards the wackos who think humans are destroying the planet. Okay, then, go ahead and off yourself. Show us how great the planet will be after you're gone and we'll be right behind you. Go on. Lead from the front.
This is pretty damn funny but it illustrates the problem of mixing business with social media. Unless you are big enough to afford to hire someone whose only job is to monitor social media and fight the trolls, you have no chance of controlling your business message. Now trolling is sanctioned by the gumint, that task is even harder.
Oh, I highly doubt that. I know a LOT of people who voted for Obama for no other reason than to be part of history in voting for the first African-American president. But that wasn't my point at all. The Obama team supposedly made extensive use of technology to focus their efforts and spread their message via what might be called an electron-roots effort. You would think that a team that's savvy about that would have known enough to hire the best people to build the ACA infrastructure. Unfortunately, it now appears that political favoritism ruled the day. That suggests that they were less interested in building the best product than they were in being the administration that built any product.
What I find ironic is that supposedly one big reason for Obama's electoral success was due to his team's deep understanding of technology, the internet, and social media compared to Republicans and yet they couldn't get a website running properly nor did they have the smarts to hire an industry leader to develop it.
The only thing this will accomplish is require every company to pay a ton of money for the privilege of asking for permission to sell something. Screw that. Screw that HARD.
Well, having used a few different Technologic products, they can boot in around 2 seconds. In practice though, once you incorporate services such as USB, boot time increases quite a bit. Their 7350 board will boot to a shell with USB in around 6 seconds. If you want full Debian, that takes well over 30 seconds. The 4900 board which uses Yocto will come up with USB and Wifi connected to a network in about 10 seconds. They're using a Freescale processor on that one. Pretty nice product.
Of course, another factor is what file system you're using. If you're using something like Ext2 and you don't gracefully shut down, you might be forced into an fsck on the next reboot which can take who knows how long. If you don't have any sort of status display for the boot sequence, that's a problem.
AFAIK, Edison isn't an ARM architecture. Not sure if that's going to be a long-term problem but what they do have going for them is the integrated wireless functionality. This has been a personal beef of mine for embedded single-board computers. Wifi was always an afterthought. You had to use a goofy USB dongle which doesn't lend itself well to a rough-service product. Technologic Systems TS-4900 addresses this in spades. I do want to know how long the Edison takes to boot because anything more than 10 seconds on a product with no display makes people think it's not working. And to be a true appliance, an actual power switch to turn it off without a graceful shutdown is essential.
For those of you old enough to remember a time before Apple had their own stores, the Apple fan would go into most electronics stores and be lucky to find an Apple-related product. Finally, Apple basically told the Cramp-USA's of the world to take a hike and opened their own stores where people could go to get an untainted look at Macs, iPods, etc. The plan worked like a charm. IMHO, Tesla is looking at the market and the fact that many car dealers have multiple brands under the same corporate umbrella and they know they're not going to get the attention they need. Tesla wants a stage that they don't have to share with other cars or even fight for a share of the sales staff.
Why isn't that whole code base in plain C/C++? Aside from hardware layers, it would seem that the higher lever functionality shouldn't be tied to a specific processor.
A few days ago, a new ant-sized radio was announced. Couple this fingerprint tech with tiny radios and the "internet of things" and eventually, some government server will have to authorize the firing of the weapon. Right now, the NICS computers, you know, the ones that are supposed to do those oh-so-important instant background checks, go down at unscheduled times and for indeterminate periods of time for no published reason. Do you really think a permission-based firearm will work when you need it? Add this one to your net neutrality arguments.
And while I have your attention, maybe a tweeting toilet is intended as a commentary on Twitter in general as in everything that's on that site is worthless crap.
Did they look at the CVs of those 100,000 people? How many of them were PhDs? How many were prolific inventors? How many where self-made *gasp* one-percenters?
How much bandwidth do you need for a family of four to stream four separate HD movies simultaneously? That would seem to be a practical threshold above which there isn't much benefit. I'd opine then that streaming one movie would be the minimum to call it broadband.
Yup. People are putting up with all that security theater, too. Even first class on some airlines has less to offer beyond a big seat. IIRC, USAir had no inflight entertainment on a Phoenix to JFK trip.
I would bet that there is money involved in this somewhere. Just as every other regulatory agency, they need money to operate. Further, they continually need to justify their existence. Technology can't be uninvented. Picture this: A small group of UAV companies need to make money and keep making money without the fear of Joe-schmo and his home-built UAV cutting in on their territory. The formal companies get together and hire a few lobbyists to convince the FAA that the home-built UAV is dangerous and needs to be regulated in the form of expensive annual certifications. The companies that could afford the lobbyists can also easily afford the annual license fees. The little guy can't so he's forced to go away. The FAA is happy to have the additional revenue and probably some baksheesh from the lobbyists so they go along with it.
I'm wondering at what point are the consumers going to rebel against all of this. The whole luggage debacle has to be included in this discussion too. First, the airlines decided to start charging for checked baggage. The customers responded by not just switching to carry-ons but finding the biggest carry-on possible and getting one for each of their kids too. Trouble is that overhead storage can't accommodate one of these for every passenger so now the extras have to get checked at the door and they don't get charged for this either. The result is more pissed off customers and departure delays. The real question is why this had to happen in the first place. Was it the additional cost of fuel? Unlikely because fuel costs are directly related to weight and the planes know how much they weigh. Is it then the higher cost of fuel? Maybe but if domestic production of oil has been increasing over the past ten plus years and is now surpassing imports to the point of producers wanting to export, why are the fuel costs still as high as they were ten years ago? Or is it labor costs which never go down?
Which leads us to the seating arrangements. Adding 10 more seats puts another roughly $5000 revenue per flight assuming that the flight is fully booked. Would you be willing to pay an extra $33.33 for one inch of legroom? If people aren't willing to spend $25 to check a bag, $33.33 must make people apoplectic. What would you be willing to give up to bring those costs down and the comfort level up?
If it's taught in the style of Connections, I'm all for it. I absolutely loathed traditional history teaching methods until I saw that series. If it's revisionist, then screw that noise.
The coffee world is already deep in bed with the organic, fare-trade, square-deal, jump-through-hoops, still-tastes-the-same movement(s). GMO coffee will make these folks lose their excrement in old testament fashion. Should be amusing to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of you who don't live in Arizona, the Forest Service mandated a certain percentage of permanent road closures in the state. Coconino (basically between I-40 and the Grand Canyon) decided to close down 80% of the roads. Yes, eight zero percent. But here's the catch: They don't physically block off the roads. You're supposed to know which roads are open and which aren't and if they find you on a closed road they can fine you. State Game & Fish and the Sheriff's Offices have already said that they aren't going to enforce this crap. Oh, and search & rescue operations aren't exempt from these rules. Hell, a local search dog unit wanted to hold a national conference and do some training in the forest. The Forest Service demanded an environmental impact study be done. What the hell are they worried about? Dog poop? How is that any different from coyote poop?
It's part of current business models. Notice how many "products" you use that you don't just buy once but rather require you to pay a monthly fee and one that appears to be inexpensive but turns out to cost a crapload of money over the long term. And how many "products" do you pay for every month whether you use them or not. (I smell a Slashdot poll) We're rapidly falling into the gravity well of not actually owning anything. Now take a look at the TV ads for the Capital One Venture card that claims to have no blackout dates or limited seating and woohoo! double miles. What they don't tell you is that they give you a very low credit limit so that it takes two to four times as long to get one of these free flights. There is ALWAYS a catch somewhere. The consumer rarely, if ever, gets everything they were promised.
I, myself, have started writing the install date with a Sharpie on every bulb I put in so I have some real-world idea of lifespan. "Oh, it'll last 5000 hours...under normal use." What the hell is normal use? "Normal" is not a standardized unit of measure despite the implied definition. Light bulb manufacturing is ultimately a business not a love affair. If they made a bulb that lasted for 10 years "under normal use" and charged the same as an older technology that only lasted a year, that company would find itself out of business. This is also why Wonka's everlasting gob stopper will lose money, too. All joking aside, this is also why home solar panels are more of a scam than anything at this point. Lots of people don't know that they have a limited lifespan and gradually lose their efficiency yet the companies snow people into thinking that they're going to make money by selling energy back to the power company. Maybe. After losing money for 3/4 of the panels' lifespan.
It's mostly smoke and mirrors. Oh, and you need to pay an environmental impact fee for the smoke and are required by law to recycle the mirrors at your expense.
If this guy is so smart on the subject of aging, why not set the limit at 65? On the plus side, Social Security and Medicare would go away. And if this guy is so eager to drop dead at 75, why not right now? Go ahead, buddy. I have the same feeling towards the wackos who think humans are destroying the planet. Okay, then, go ahead and off yourself. Show us how great the planet will be after you're gone and we'll be right behind you. Go on. Lead from the front.
This is pretty damn funny but it illustrates the problem of mixing business with social media. Unless you are big enough to afford to hire someone whose only job is to monitor social media and fight the trolls, you have no chance of controlling your business message. Now trolling is sanctioned by the gumint, that task is even harder.
Oh, I highly doubt that. I know a LOT of people who voted for Obama for no other reason than to be part of history in voting for the first African-American president.
But that wasn't my point at all. The Obama team supposedly made extensive use of technology to focus their efforts and spread their message via what might be called an electron-roots effort. You would think that a team that's savvy about that would have known enough to hire the best people to build the ACA infrastructure. Unfortunately, it now appears that political favoritism ruled the day. That suggests that they were less interested in building the best product than they were in being the administration that built any product.
What I find ironic is that supposedly one big reason for Obama's electoral success was due to his team's deep understanding of technology, the internet, and social media compared to Republicans and yet they couldn't get a website running properly nor did they have the smarts to hire an industry leader to develop it.
Sheldon Cooper needs to do some research that gets him an Ig Nobel now that he's no longer doing string theory.
Just let it go, people.
The only thing this will accomplish is require every company to pay a ton of money for the privilege of asking for permission to sell something. Screw that. Screw that HARD.
Well, having used a few different Technologic products, they can boot in around 2 seconds. In practice though, once you incorporate services such as USB, boot time increases quite a bit. Their 7350 board will boot to a shell with USB in around 6 seconds. If you want full Debian, that takes well over 30 seconds. The 4900 board which uses Yocto will come up with USB and Wifi connected to a network in about 10 seconds. They're using a Freescale processor on that one. Pretty nice product.
Of course, another factor is what file system you're using. If you're using something like Ext2 and you don't gracefully shut down, you might be forced into an fsck on the next reboot which can take who knows how long. If you don't have any sort of status display for the boot sequence, that's a problem.
Obligatory "Real Genius" reference. "Your mother puts license plates on your underwear? How do you sit?"
AFAIK, Edison isn't an ARM architecture. Not sure if that's going to be a long-term problem but what they do have going for them is the integrated wireless functionality. This has been a personal beef of mine for embedded single-board computers. Wifi was always an afterthought. You had to use a goofy USB dongle which doesn't lend itself well to a rough-service product. Technologic Systems TS-4900 addresses this in spades. I do want to know how long the Edison takes to boot because anything more than 10 seconds on a product with no display makes people think it's not working. And to be a true appliance, an actual power switch to turn it off without a graceful shutdown is essential.
For those of you old enough to remember a time before Apple had their own stores, the Apple fan would go into most electronics stores and be lucky to find an Apple-related product. Finally, Apple basically told the Cramp-USA's of the world to take a hike and opened their own stores where people could go to get an untainted look at Macs, iPods, etc. The plan worked like a charm. IMHO, Tesla is looking at the market and the fact that many car dealers have multiple brands under the same corporate umbrella and they know they're not going to get the attention they need. Tesla wants a stage that they don't have to share with other cars or even fight for a share of the sales staff.
Why isn't that whole code base in plain C/C++? Aside from hardware layers, it would seem that the higher lever functionality shouldn't be tied to a specific processor.
A few days ago, a new ant-sized radio was announced. Couple this fingerprint tech with tiny radios and the "internet of things" and eventually, some government server will have to authorize the firing of the weapon. Right now, the NICS computers, you know, the ones that are supposed to do those oh-so-important instant background checks, go down at unscheduled times and for indeterminate periods of time for no published reason. Do you really think a permission-based firearm will work when you need it? Add this one to your net neutrality arguments.
will be Faraday cages.
And while I have your attention, maybe a tweeting toilet is intended as a commentary on Twitter in general as in everything that's on that site is worthless crap.
Did they look at the CVs of those 100,000 people? How many of them were PhDs? How many were prolific inventors? How many where self-made *gasp* one-percenters?
Given that governments usually buy the crappiest software out there, this will be easily cracked. Not that I'm suggesting people do this, mind you.
How much bandwidth do you need for a family of four to stream four separate HD movies simultaneously? That would seem to be a practical threshold above which there isn't much benefit. I'd opine then that streaming one movie would be the minimum to call it broadband.
I've always heard that it was six pounds. It's funnier because the bag might survive or it might break but you won't know when or where.
Yup. People are putting up with all that security theater, too. Even first class on some airlines has less to offer beyond a big seat. IIRC, USAir had no inflight entertainment on a Phoenix to JFK trip.
I would bet that there is money involved in this somewhere. Just as every other regulatory agency, they need money to operate. Further, they continually need to justify their existence. Technology can't be uninvented. Picture this: A small group of UAV companies need to make money and keep making money without the fear of Joe-schmo and his home-built UAV cutting in on their territory. The formal companies get together and hire a few lobbyists to convince the FAA that the home-built UAV is dangerous and needs to be regulated in the form of expensive annual certifications. The companies that could afford the lobbyists can also easily afford the annual license fees. The little guy can't so he's forced to go away. The FAA is happy to have the additional revenue and probably some baksheesh from the lobbyists so they go along with it.
I'm wondering at what point are the consumers going to rebel against all of this. The whole luggage debacle has to be included in this discussion too. First, the airlines decided to start charging for checked baggage. The customers responded by not just switching to carry-ons but finding the biggest carry-on possible and getting one for each of their kids too. Trouble is that overhead storage can't accommodate one of these for every passenger so now the extras have to get checked at the door and they don't get charged for this either. The result is more pissed off customers and departure delays. The real question is why this had to happen in the first place. Was it the additional cost of fuel? Unlikely because fuel costs are directly related to weight and the planes know how much they weigh. Is it then the higher cost of fuel? Maybe but if domestic production of oil has been increasing over the past ten plus years and is now surpassing imports to the point of producers wanting to export, why are the fuel costs still as high as they were ten years ago? Or is it labor costs which never go down?
Which leads us to the seating arrangements. Adding 10 more seats puts another roughly $5000 revenue per flight assuming that the flight is fully booked. Would you be willing to pay an extra $33.33 for one inch of legroom? If people aren't willing to spend $25 to check a bag, $33.33 must make people apoplectic. What would you be willing to give up to bring those costs down and the comfort level up?
If it's taught in the style of Connections, I'm all for it. I absolutely loathed traditional history teaching methods until I saw that series.
If it's revisionist, then screw that noise.
The coffee world is already deep in bed with the organic, fare-trade, square-deal, jump-through-hoops, still-tastes-the-same movement(s). GMO coffee will make these folks lose their excrement in old testament fashion. Should be amusing to watch.