In particular, Youtube and Spotify seem to be raking money hand-over-fist. Daniel Elk, founder of Spotify comes to mind as someone benefitting disproportionately from other people's work. But that's tricky. He is arguably helping artists. I'm not sure he's helping us to the tune of $400M dollars, though.
And this is where you're mistaken in a whole lot of things. First, Spotify's revenue is about $200M US a year. It's actually posting a loss, meaning there's no profit at the end of that. Ek's worth is based off what investors think Spotify is worth as a company, which really has little to do with what you're paid, which is a function of revenue they bring in minus musicians payouts, which appears to be a sizable portion of what they're bringing in.
At the moment, the safe harbor provision prevents anyone (artists, record labels, etc.) from suing an OSP (online service provider) for any customer/member hosting one's music without permission. Think for a moment about who the OSPs are and you might realize that they are not your favorite companies either.
OSPs aren't my favorite, but they have little to nothing to do with your situation. Take Spotify above, even if they paid all their revenue to musicians, you'd still be bitching. I say that because apparently that's about what Spotify is doing today. You make say that they're not paying enough and charge them more, but all that happens at that point is that they fail and go away. Same for YouTube (effectively, they'll stop hosting all music) and radio, which will just do more classical and talk of various sorts. The people, your direct customers, have decided they're willing to pay about $1 / song when they buy music, and are willing to spend about $10 / month for a streaming source. They also likely only have 'x' to spend each year (totaling something like $15B last I looked) Now, somehow, that $15B need to be equitably divided among the artists. I'd say you start looking at what slice your contributions made to that pie and how much you're getting from it. I'd claim that Spotify and other OSPs are not currently really profiting from your efforts, although the traffic does help them in other ways.
"The real answer is to put the user in control, by default, of the way the page renders."
And thereby destroying the core use case for CSS. What?
Apparently you're totally ignorant of the actual purposes of HTML, and CSS for that matter. It's only guidance to how things are to be displayed, it's not nor ever was meant for the developer/designer to actually "control" what comes out on the other end. The sooner you realize that, the happier and more productive you'll be, and the fewer bugs you'll have in your code.
And the dev tools are? Oh yeah, those wonderful browser things appear to be the "best". Compared to other languages and tooling, JS at best has a poor haberdashery of developer tools when it comes to tracing down bugs in logic that may have started 20 closures ago.
My thought was "Oh good, now we can have lots of high quality apps that cover all those variations we don't currently have", because the App Store is so devoid of quality apps.
I'm glad we agree that he shouldn't be making money off it. I don't think you are aware of how he contributes to what is already a difficult problem for recording artists. He's not the only reason I'm getting screwed, but he's definitely part of a larger picture.
He's actually an afterthought in why you're getting screwed. The labels are the primary, and until artists realize it nothing will change. However, they hold such a monopoly on things these days that even an established artist with a large fan base cannot really go it alone.
In short, what you're advocating is that you should kill YouTube. I'm not sure what the fallout means for you personally, but if you had no YouTube nor any replacement because they're all subject to the same death sentence, exactly where are you going to promote yourself?
You're missing the entire solution there, although you've hit upon a whole bunch of the problems. The real answer is to put the user in control, by default, of the way the page renders. If some JS wants to override the right click, it can only do so within a context wrapped by a control context. That control context will allow the user to, say, force normal right click behavior, or standard scroll bars, or standard left click behavior, for that matter, via simple controls that could be enforced by default on the browser. It probably should be by default.
This is why I watch so little TV these days, I just don't have time to follow multiple series from beginning to end. If I watch a series on Netflix I go to older shows like Star Trek where I can jump around, even the later series with overall arcs like DS9 still had a lot of self-contained episodes in them and important details that spanned multiple episodes were often given a quick recap for those who haven't watched the entire season.
Same thing with The X-Files, pretty much the only episodes that I re-watch are the "monster-of-the-week" ones. Especially as I found the arc to be increasingly silly and overly confusing as the show went on in the original run.
The story arcs are great as background stories, if done right. The problem with shows like X-Files and a host of others is that they run too long. While people may hate that Firefly ended in 1 season, it might be its saving grace - a full story line and that's it. No milking the show's characters for 5 more seasons with ever stranger and more manufactured situations for them to get out of. I'm ok with loose ends at the end of a show indicating there might be more to come, but leaving me at a point where the current story line satisfyingly ended.
OTOH, you could do other things. My TV watching is down to a handful of shows, probably less than 2 a week on average through out the year. Thanks to the wonders of DVRs, I just set and forget, and then watch when I've got time. If it wasn't for DVRs, I think I'd probably not watch any shows. Netflix has had 0 shows I'm interested in.
Meh, increase tax on trucks and you'll just increase the price of everything you buy in the stores.
Not that I don't agree with the rest of your thesis, it's just that "user pays" government infrastructure is a fallacy. Governments just break up taxes so they seem more palatable on the surface, when in reality they just care about how big the pool is.
In this case, there's a direct user link. Will it increase the price of what you buy in stores? Of course. The money's going to come from somewhere no matter who pays in the end. Seems like user pays in this particular scenario would be the best and most equitable route. As a reference, just saw that London comes the closest in England to repaving their roads at the needed 10-20 year interval, at 23 years, and I can attest that is not often enough. Other places only get repaved as little as every 60 years, directly as a result of lack of money. The US is no better based on the infrastructure (bridges) audit reported last year, although I don't have nice numbers like for the UK. Although I know personally that you could not drive in the right hand lane I-30 in Arkansas a few years ago unless you had a high clearance vehicle due to the ruts from trucks in it. It did have the beneficial effect of auto-steering, as it took effort to climb out of them.
California's messed up priorities like protecting our water?
Perhaps CA could actually spend a little of that money building water reservoirs so they wouldn't have to continue to plunder all the water rights from their neighboring states (I'm too lazy to look up the deal they made in the early 1900s) It's sad that when it does rain in CA, all the rain immediately runs out into the Pacific via huge storm drains.
CA is still the land of milk and honey and you all raising cattle in a desert are going against nature. You're also draining an aquifer that feeds at least 8 states, that one refills much much much slower than y'all are draining it.
And CA isn't raising cattle in or farming the desert? Or draining the aquifer under San Joaquin Valley so fast the land is noticeably sinking?
You might want to remove that plank from your eye first.
Yep, original planning accounted for thoroughfare traffic following the main road. Several neighborhoods I'm familiar with have closed off entrances and/or exits to fix the "cut through racer".
You want private access, have a private road. If it's paid for with public funds and it's not gated, as long as laws are followed it's fair game.
It's not private access, it's neighborhood access. For instance, I live in a neighborhood now that's constructed specifically so that all neighborhood roads are cul-de-sacs or loops. There are virtually no through streets, and for the 1 street that I know of that is a "through" street through the neighborhood, you wind up driving an extra mile or two through multiple stop signs. IMHO, all neighborhoods should be designed that way, and it's easy enough to create in many existing neighborhoods. Through traffic and neighborhoods don't mix.
All the businesses leaving CA for TX are happily waving goodbye to CA...it used to be the land of milk and honey.
It still is, just getting more expensive like anything else that's desired yet limited in supply. As for TX, I can see taxes going up there significantly as they start tackling water issues as well. With the huge influx of people, they'll need more water. With the EPA being led by an anti-environmental administration, it might be time to start as many new lakes as they can manage.
A speed bump is no obstruction if you're driving within the legal speed limit.
I guess that's true if you're driving an offroad 4x4. There are speed "bumps" around here you actually go around the block to avoid driving over in anything less. The tops of those bumps are heavily scarred from those that thought, like you, ahh, I can drive over these.... only to leave a transmission behind.
It actually depends on the road surface itself. Improperly laid asphalt which will hold up fine for 5 years on regular residential traffic might last less than 6 months in thoroughfare conditions. Throw in a few heavy trucks, and it could be a couple of months.
You are right on the heavy trucks though, every time I see one of those "This truck pays $10,000 a year in road taxes" I think "Damn, we're getting ripped off". Why? Because 1 loaded truck does the damage of roughly 100,000 cars, and you're paying considerably more than $0.10/year in road taxes. Now also consider that trucks on average drive more than 10 times as far the average car per year, and you see that they're paying a pittance for the damage they cause. Perhaps a $1/gallon road tax on diesel might level the playing field and help fund our infrastructure.
Hope you enjoy all the extra brake dust and exhaust from vehicles unnecessarily braking and accelerating through your neighborhood!
I'd be happier if they didn't cut through the neighborhood in the first place. After all, the road was put there for neighborhood access, not thoroughfare traffic.
I get a bit upset when they tinker with a classic tale to just be politically correct, or controversial, etc.
The old characters were just fine as they were.
If they want to create new tales and do gay characters...why not?
Are you sure? Admittedly, it's been a really long time since I have seen any piece of BB, but from what little I recall, that character seemed rather effeminate then, as in gay in the "Don't ask, don't tell" kind of way. This particular casting didn't bother me, what bothered me was the overt PC marketing around it. Then again, that may have just been a preventative PR strike.
I personally *despise* the episodic model. I'm all for the serialized one, and in fact, except Netflix's offerings, the serialized versions found on networked shows pale in comparison (in terms of serialization that is). I'm one of those people who really enjoyed the serializing nature of LOST
Lots of people liked LOST, I couldn't get past episode 1. The whole running engine on a crashed plane thing? Right.... I also like episodic series, especially well done ones where there is an underlying story arc for those that watch the whole series, but that pretty much is glossed over for those only watching an episode here or there.
I absolutely never watch episodic television. I find it cheap, and non-artistic. In a perfect world, I'd like most TV shows (not all, but most) to end in 3 seasons: beginning-middle-end. And each season to comprise from 6-9 episodes: beginning-middle-end. Like a book.
I do agree that shorter seasons would be far far better for serialized series, and that they shouldn't outlive their base story line.
What do you mean no new ideas? What about beauty and the beast (now with newly GAY characters)?
There...fixed that for you....
I'd say "Who cares" but obviously you do. The biggest beef I have against it, and several other Disney productions, is the seemingly non-stop singing that takes the flow of the plot and chops, strangles, and then stomps on it for good measure. Wait, I feel another song coming on.....
So, if those miracle 10 minute chargeable batteries are so common
Not particularly common, but available. Most manufacturers prefer energy density to charge time. You get ~2/3rds the energy density on fast charging packs that you get on the highest density 18650s.
So, a little less energy density (30%?) I think for fast charge rates people would give up 30% runtime in a whole host of pluggable environments. So there must be some other reason we don't see reliable fast charge batteries in common applications. I'm thinking cost would be number one.
(Hoverboards) So far, some reports have blamed the batteries, others the cables, but we don't know for sure
Having owned one, and noting that there was a significant spark when attempting to plug it in, I'd say there was more wrong with those hoverboards than just batteries or chargers... quite possible the entire charging subcomponent consisted of a single wire from plug to battery. I had to plug it in a second time just to be sure I saw what I saw, and Amazon kindly refunded it immediately.
Not a single thing that you listed uses fast charge batteries.
And yet they all wound up in smoking piles of burnt electronics.
Right. Computing is the one thing that's advanced so dramatically. Your expectation that if a technology doesn't advance as fast as computing is absurd.
Of course it's absurd. We're also in the very very beginning of this tech. It's no different than the invention of the wheel to hyperloop, just compressed down into roughly 80 years. Just wait on the next technical revolution that may go even faster - bio-engineering.
Tensile strengths? To what are you referring?
I'm referring to tensile strength. If you don't know what tensile strength is, you really need to learn some very, very basic physics. That's like saying "I don't know what mass is"
Of course of materials. Materials in all fields. Tensile strengths, compressive strengths, elastic moduli, etc have all improved with time.
Totally incorrect - the tensile strength of an elemental material is a physical limit. Now, we may have not reached those limits in manufactured components, but the tensile strength is fixed. Now, for engineered materials, we certainly are improving, as well as creating new materials and new manufacturing techniques that bring us much closer to that physical maximum we seek on a macro scale.
But like pretty much every technological field except computing, the rate of improvements are nothing at all like some endless, 1.5-year exponential growth rate.
Computers, in case you haven't noticed, have fallen off the treadmill. The last 5 years at least have almost been standing still.
Batteries win hands down.
I guess I didn't recall how recently Lithium ion batteries came into existence. They certainly increased battery performance hugely, but within them they haven't really done more than double or triple over the last 20 years. (Note, that leaves the first 10 years where there were significant improvements)
ICEs still to this date are nowhere near their Carnot limit.
But they are near the physical limits of power losses due to friction and conduction losses until a frictionless, non-melting non-conducting material can be found, at least regarding efficiency. Now power out of a given sized engine? That can still go up quite a bit, at least from what we have in our day to day cars.
Today's tires are better in rolling resistance, comfort, safety, *and* cost than those of several decades ago. But again, the curve is nothing like that of computing.
Actually, tires have improved tremendously in many
Publicising their QA process now serves to help defend against current and future litigation.
It doesn't do squat against current litigation. Litigation already in progress related to a past event isn't going to be helped by what you started doing today to prevent said event in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
In particular, Youtube and Spotify seem to be raking money hand-over-fist. Daniel Elk, founder of Spotify comes to mind as someone benefitting disproportionately from other people's work. But that's tricky. He is arguably helping artists. I'm not sure he's helping us to the tune of $400M dollars, though.
And this is where you're mistaken in a whole lot of things. First, Spotify's revenue is about $200M US a year. It's actually posting a loss, meaning there's no profit at the end of that. Ek's worth is based off what investors think Spotify is worth as a company, which really has little to do with what you're paid, which is a function of revenue they bring in minus musicians payouts, which appears to be a sizable portion of what they're bringing in.
At the moment, the safe harbor provision prevents anyone (artists, record labels, etc.) from suing an OSP (online service provider) for any customer/member hosting one's music without permission. Think for a moment about who the OSPs are and you might realize that they are not your favorite companies either.
OSPs aren't my favorite, but they have little to nothing to do with your situation. Take Spotify above, even if they paid all their revenue to musicians, you'd still be bitching. I say that because apparently that's about what Spotify is doing today. You make say that they're not paying enough and charge them more, but all that happens at that point is that they fail and go away. Same for YouTube (effectively, they'll stop hosting all music) and radio, which will just do more classical and talk of various sorts. The people, your direct customers, have decided they're willing to pay about $1 / song when they buy music, and are willing to spend about $10 / month for a streaming source. They also likely only have 'x' to spend each year (totaling something like $15B last I looked) Now, somehow, that $15B need to be equitably divided among the artists. I'd say you start looking at what slice your contributions made to that pie and how much you're getting from it. I'd claim that Spotify and other OSPs are not currently really profiting from your efforts, although the traffic does help them in other ways.
"The real answer is to put the user in control, by default, of the way the page renders."
And thereby destroying the core use case for CSS. What?
Apparently you're totally ignorant of the actual purposes of HTML, and CSS for that matter. It's only guidance to how things are to be displayed, it's not nor ever was meant for the developer/designer to actually "control" what comes out on the other end. The sooner you realize that, the happier and more productive you'll be, and the fewer bugs you'll have in your code.
And the dev tools are? Oh yeah, those wonderful browser things appear to be the "best". Compared to other languages and tooling, JS at best has a poor haberdashery of developer tools when it comes to tracing down bugs in logic that may have started 20 closures ago.
My thought was "Oh good, now we can have lots of high quality apps that cover all those variations we don't currently have", because the App Store is so devoid of quality apps.
I'm glad we agree that he shouldn't be making money off it. I don't think you are aware of how he contributes to what is already a difficult problem for recording artists. He's not the only reason I'm getting screwed, but he's definitely part of a larger picture.
He's actually an afterthought in why you're getting screwed. The labels are the primary, and until artists realize it nothing will change. However, they hold such a monopoly on things these days that even an established artist with a large fan base cannot really go it alone.
In short, what you're advocating is that you should kill YouTube. I'm not sure what the fallout means for you personally, but if you had no YouTube nor any replacement because they're all subject to the same death sentence, exactly where are you going to promote yourself?
The streaming company and any label take the vast majority of income.
And that's different from any of the other revenue streams how?
A better fix would just be to disable the damn thing. I can't think of a single time I've found a javascript pop-up useful.
Oh, all the time, especially when I'm in development.
You're missing the entire solution there, although you've hit upon a whole bunch of the problems. The real answer is to put the user in control, by default, of the way the page renders. If some JS wants to override the right click, it can only do so within a context wrapped by a control context. That control context will allow the user to, say, force normal right click behavior, or standard scroll bars, or standard left click behavior, for that matter, via simple controls that could be enforced by default on the browser. It probably should be by default.
This is why I watch so little TV these days, I just don't have time to follow multiple series from beginning to end. If I watch a series on Netflix I go to older shows like Star Trek where I can jump around, even the later series with overall arcs like DS9 still had a lot of self-contained episodes in them and important details that spanned multiple episodes were often given a quick recap for those who haven't watched the entire season.
Same thing with The X-Files, pretty much the only episodes that I re-watch are the "monster-of-the-week" ones. Especially as I found the arc to be increasingly silly and overly confusing as the show went on in the original run.
The story arcs are great as background stories, if done right. The problem with shows like X-Files and a host of others is that they run too long. While people may hate that Firefly ended in 1 season, it might be its saving grace - a full story line and that's it. No milking the show's characters for 5 more seasons with ever stranger and more manufactured situations for them to get out of. I'm ok with loose ends at the end of a show indicating there might be more to come, but leaving me at a point where the current story line satisfyingly ended.
You people are not doing medical research, astrophysics, or materials science. At best, the only problem you may be solving is boredom.
But they are keeping the masses from revolting.
OTOH, you could do other things. My TV watching is down to a handful of shows, probably less than 2 a week on average through out the year. Thanks to the wonders of DVRs, I just set and forget, and then watch when I've got time. If it wasn't for DVRs, I think I'd probably not watch any shows. Netflix has had 0 shows I'm interested in.
Meh, increase tax on trucks and you'll just increase the price of everything you buy in the stores.
Not that I don't agree with the rest of your thesis, it's just that "user pays" government infrastructure is a fallacy. Governments just break up taxes so they seem more palatable on the surface, when in reality they just care about how big the pool is.
In this case, there's a direct user link. Will it increase the price of what you buy in stores? Of course. The money's going to come from somewhere no matter who pays in the end. Seems like user pays in this particular scenario would be the best and most equitable route. As a reference, just saw that London comes the closest in England to repaving their roads at the needed 10-20 year interval, at 23 years, and I can attest that is not often enough. Other places only get repaved as little as every 60 years, directly as a result of lack of money. The US is no better based on the infrastructure (bridges) audit reported last year, although I don't have nice numbers like for the UK. Although I know personally that you could not drive in the right hand lane I-30 in Arkansas a few years ago unless you had a high clearance vehicle due to the ruts from trucks in it. It did have the beneficial effect of auto-steering, as it took effort to climb out of them.
California's messed up priorities like protecting our water?
Perhaps CA could actually spend a little of that money building water reservoirs so they wouldn't have to continue to plunder all the water rights from their neighboring states (I'm too lazy to look up the deal they made in the early 1900s) It's sad that when it does rain in CA, all the rain immediately runs out into the Pacific via huge storm drains.
CA is still the land of milk and honey and you all raising cattle in a desert are going against nature. You're also draining an aquifer that feeds at least 8 states, that one refills much much much slower than y'all are draining it.
And CA isn't raising cattle in or farming the desert? Or draining the aquifer under San Joaquin Valley so fast the land is noticeably sinking?
You might want to remove that plank from your eye first.
Was it?
Yep, original planning accounted for thoroughfare traffic following the main road. Several neighborhoods I'm familiar with have closed off entrances and/or exits to fix the "cut through racer".
You want private access, have a private road. If it's paid for with public funds and it's not gated, as long as laws are followed it's fair game.
It's not private access, it's neighborhood access. For instance, I live in a neighborhood now that's constructed specifically so that all neighborhood roads are cul-de-sacs or loops. There are virtually no through streets, and for the 1 street that I know of that is a "through" street through the neighborhood, you wind up driving an extra mile or two through multiple stop signs. IMHO, all neighborhoods should be designed that way, and it's easy enough to create in many existing neighborhoods. Through traffic and neighborhoods don't mix.
All the businesses leaving CA for TX are happily waving goodbye to CA...it used to be the land of milk and honey.
It still is, just getting more expensive like anything else that's desired yet limited in supply. As for TX, I can see taxes going up there significantly as they start tackling water issues as well. With the huge influx of people, they'll need more water. With the EPA being led by an anti-environmental administration, it might be time to start as many new lakes as they can manage.
A speed bump is no obstruction if you're driving within the legal speed limit.
I guess that's true if you're driving an offroad 4x4. There are speed "bumps" around here you actually go around the block to avoid driving over in anything less. The tops of those bumps are heavily scarred from those that thought, like you, ahh, I can drive over these.... only to leave a transmission behind.
It actually depends on the road surface itself. Improperly laid asphalt which will hold up fine for 5 years on regular residential traffic might last less than 6 months in thoroughfare conditions. Throw in a few heavy trucks, and it could be a couple of months.
You are right on the heavy trucks though, every time I see one of those "This truck pays $10,000 a year in road taxes" I think "Damn, we're getting ripped off". Why? Because 1 loaded truck does the damage of roughly 100,000 cars, and you're paying considerably more than $0.10/year in road taxes. Now also consider that trucks on average drive more than 10 times as far the average car per year, and you see that they're paying a pittance for the damage they cause. Perhaps a $1/gallon road tax on diesel might level the playing field and help fund our infrastructure.
Hope you enjoy all the extra brake dust and exhaust from vehicles unnecessarily braking and accelerating through your neighborhood!
I'd be happier if they didn't cut through the neighborhood in the first place. After all, the road was put there for neighborhood access, not thoroughfare traffic.
I get a bit upset when they tinker with a classic tale to just be politically correct, or controversial, etc.
The old characters were just fine as they were.
If they want to create new tales and do gay characters...why not?
Are you sure? Admittedly, it's been a really long time since I have seen any piece of BB, but from what little I recall, that character seemed rather effeminate then, as in gay in the "Don't ask, don't tell" kind of way. This particular casting didn't bother me, what bothered me was the overt PC marketing around it. Then again, that may have just been a preventative PR strike.
I personally *despise* the episodic model. I'm all for the serialized one, and in fact, except Netflix's offerings, the serialized versions found on networked shows pale in comparison (in terms of serialization that is). I'm one of those people who really enjoyed the serializing nature of LOST
Lots of people liked LOST, I couldn't get past episode 1. The whole running engine on a crashed plane thing? Right.... I also like episodic series, especially well done ones where there is an underlying story arc for those that watch the whole series, but that pretty much is glossed over for those only watching an episode here or there.
I absolutely never watch episodic television. I find it cheap, and non-artistic. In a perfect world, I'd like most TV shows (not all, but most) to end in 3 seasons: beginning-middle-end. And each season to comprise from 6-9 episodes: beginning-middle-end. Like a book.
I do agree that shorter seasons would be far far better for serialized series, and that they shouldn't outlive their base story line.
I not sure they do, I often leave my cable box on for hours on some random channel. I'm sure the cats change them at will too.
There...fixed that for you....
I'd say "Who cares" but obviously you do. The biggest beef I have against it, and several other Disney productions, is the seemingly non-stop singing that takes the flow of the plot and chops, strangles, and then stomps on it for good measure. Wait, I feel another song coming on.....
Not particularly common, but available. Most manufacturers prefer energy density to charge time. You get ~2/3rds the energy density on fast charging packs that you get on the highest density 18650s.
So, a little less energy density (30%?) I think for fast charge rates people would give up 30% runtime in a whole host of pluggable environments. So there must be some other reason we don't see reliable fast charge batteries in common applications. I'm thinking cost would be number one.
(Hoverboards) So far, some reports have blamed the batteries, others the cables, but we don't know for sure
Having owned one, and noting that there was a significant spark when attempting to plug it in, I'd say there was more wrong with those hoverboards than just batteries or chargers... quite possible the entire charging subcomponent consisted of a single wire from plug to battery. I had to plug it in a second time just to be sure I saw what I saw, and Amazon kindly refunded it immediately.
Not a single thing that you listed uses fast charge batteries.
And yet they all wound up in smoking piles of burnt electronics.
Right. Computing is the one thing that's advanced so dramatically. Your expectation that if a technology doesn't advance as fast as computing is absurd.
Of course it's absurd. We're also in the very very beginning of this tech. It's no different than the invention of the wheel to hyperloop, just compressed down into roughly 80 years. Just wait on the next technical revolution that may go even faster - bio-engineering.
I'm referring to tensile strength. If you don't know what tensile strength is, you really need to learn some very, very basic physics. That's like saying "I don't know what mass is"
Of course of materials. Materials in all fields. Tensile strengths, compressive strengths, elastic moduli, etc have all improved with time.
Totally incorrect - the tensile strength of an elemental material is a physical limit. Now, we may have not reached those limits in manufactured components, but the tensile strength is fixed. Now, for engineered materials, we certainly are improving, as well as creating new materials and new manufacturing techniques that bring us much closer to that physical maximum we seek on a macro scale.
But like pretty much every technological field except computing, the rate of improvements are nothing at all like some endless, 1.5-year exponential growth rate.
Computers, in case you haven't noticed, have fallen off the treadmill. The last 5 years at least have almost been standing still.
Batteries win hands down.
I guess I didn't recall how recently Lithium ion batteries came into existence. They certainly increased battery performance hugely, but within them they haven't really done more than double or triple over the last 20 years. (Note, that leaves the first 10 years where there were significant improvements)
ICEs still to this date are nowhere near their Carnot limit.
But they are near the physical limits of power losses due to friction and conduction losses until a frictionless, non-melting non-conducting material can be found, at least regarding efficiency. Now power out of a given sized engine? That can still go up quite a bit, at least from what we have in our day to day cars.
Today's tires are better in rolling resistance, comfort, safety, *and* cost than those of several decades ago. But again, the curve is nothing like that of computing.
Actually, tires have improved tremendously in many
Publicising their QA process now serves to help defend against current and future litigation.
It doesn't do squat against current litigation. Litigation already in progress related to a past event isn't going to be helped by what you started doing today to prevent said event in the future.