It's the Hollywood studios who make the artificial distinction between DVD/Blu-ray rentals and streaming rentals. They're both ways to get the same bits to your TV, just one does it on a plastic disc, the other does it over wires. But since Hollywood controls the supply and has contsitutional rights to control "distribution", their illogical world-view is what counts. So Netflix (and other rental/streaming companies) have to negotiate separate licenses for rental rights vs. streaming rights. And Hollywood execs have this weird world-view where there must be a delay between theater releases, followed by pay-per-view releases, followed by disc sales, followed by subscription services, followed by syndication on TV. So streaming selection (lumped with subscription services) will always be a step behind disc rentals (which are lumped with disc sales).
Also, the poor Netflix support for Android was also because of Hollywood. They're extremely picky about authorizing ways to decrypt streamed movies. There are basically two ways - a hardware device, and a software device. Software authorization is what's used when you stream Netflix (or Hulu, or HBO Go) on a browser. Hollywood requires the software be run in an encrypted virtual machine with the video stream piped directly to the display, so there's no way for the end user to grab the decrypted video stream and save it. This means special video decoding hardware built into GPUs can't be used, since the encrypted VM runs entirely in the CPU. Phones and tablet CPUs aren't yet powerful enough to do 1080p video decryption in the CPU. So Netflix had to make the Netflix app use the GPU's video decode hardware on Android and iOS. But that meant they had to get their app authorized as a hardware device. For iOS this was relatively easy since there only about a half dozen new iOS devices released each year. It was an entirely different story for Android since there are hundreds if not over a thousand Android devices released each year. Netflix had to get Hollywood's authorization for running the Netflix app on each one of these different Android devices one at a time.
1080p Blu-ray was encrypted by HDCP. Intel somehow lost the master key, allowing anyone to decode any past and future content encoded with HDCP 2.1 or earlier. The studios' response was to create an entirely new, not backwards-compatible HDCP 2.2 around the time the HDMI 4k video standard (HDMI 2.0) was released. Unfortunately they did it late, so there was about a 1-year gap when 4k equipment was sold with HDMI 2.0 capability, but not HDCP 2.2. This meant that these 4k TVs and Blu-ray players could not play commercial 4k Blu-rays. If you burned your own 4k movies to Blu-ray they would play, but not the stuff Hollywood released. I spent a lot of time warning people not to buy 4k equipment that first year, and warning them to be careful to check for "HDCP 2.2" in the specs that second year. Hollywood doesn't care if your TV/Blu-ray player doesn't work. They just want their crap protected.
HDCP 2.2 was broken in late 2015. Not sure if it was cracked or someone just made a device using a legit HDCP 2.2 decryption key. But if it was cracked, we're probably going to go through all this again. Hollywood will insist a new not backwards-compatible HDCP 2.3, and it will be used to encode all future Blu-rays starting with 8k releases.
They also enjoy double- or triple-dipping: charging you full price for a license to the same movie in different formats. Same with the record studios, who had no qualms about charging your for the same song on vinyl, tape, and CD. The software industry gets this right - they let you upgrade at a discounted price if you own a previous version. This reflects the reality that you already purchased a license for the previous versions, and thus the new version is only giving you some new functionality instead of entirely new functionality. But Hollywood has self-deluded themselves into thinking that their product is a license when it's convenient for them if it's a license, and a product when it's convenient for them if it's a product. So will charge you full price even if you've already purchased licenses for the movie three times at 360i (VHS), 525i (DVD), and 1080p.
People need to stop putting up with this crap and demand lower-price upgrade licenses for content they've already paid for. IMHO a lot of piracy would disappear if the studios simply adopted pricing which better reflected reality. Most people want to pay content creators for their work, but not if they judge that the content creators are trying to rip them off. The whole fiasco with Windows XP support contracts is a great example. Microsoft pushed support contracts for XP hard and lots of companies signed up. Instead of buying XP, they were buying 3 years of Windows support, which would include XP and an upgrade to the next version of Windows (new versions normally come out about every 3 years). Unfortunately Vista got delayed and wasn't released until 5.5 years after XP - outside the support contract period these companies had paid for. There was hell to pay, with many companies believing Microsoft deliberately delayed Vista so they wouldn't have to fulfil that portion of the contract. Even though Microsoft eventually relented and gave these companies Vista, many of them will never buy a support contract or subscription software from Microsoft again. Because they judge it to be unfairly skewed in favor of the supplier.
The Core M processor is actually a dual core mobile Core i7 (4MB of cache instead of 3MB like the i3 and i5). Its primary distinction is that it's binned to operate at extremely low power, and it has aggressive thermal throttling (to keep it within the TDP window). That's why you'll see the Core M outperform the mobile i5 on certain benchmarks - if the benchmark is short enough that thermal throttling doesn't kick in, the Core M's 4MB cache allows it to outpace the i5 and its 3MB cache.
There was more to complain about with the very first gen Core M (Broadwell). Those would only turbo boost on a single core. If you were doing something which used both cores, it was stuck at its base clock speed which was pretty low (800 MHz to 1.2 GHz). But starting with Skylake they'll all turbo boost on both cores.
I would never get one because I do lots of things which require sustained CPU capability (gaming, compiling, number crunching, data processing, etc). But for the 95% of the population who only needs bursty CPU power for web browsing and firing off tweets and Facebook posts, it's pretty ideal. I got one for my dad and he loves it - the extremely long battery life and lack of fan noise (no fan to make noise) are big pluses in his book.
Intel has begun mixing it up lately though - some of the newer dual core mobile i5s have 4MB cache, some 3MB. It's getting to the point where you need to look up the exact CPU model before buying.
The way Intel, Samsung, and TSMC measure transistor size isn't the same. Some of Intel's 22nm transistor structures were smaller than TSMC's 16nm. I do agree Intel's lead has shrunk, but just because one process is called 14nm and another 10nm doesn't really matter - transistor density and production yields are what are important.
Samsung's battery division is new, and the Note 7 battery was their first major production battery. So no, you wouldn't really expect their engineers to know within 2 weeks what the problem was. Li-ion batteries are extremely temperamental, and it may be a problem other battery manufacturers learned about and designed around 10 years ago but which blindsided Samsung's engineers.
The fires in the "fixed" Note 7s (which used a battery from an established Chinese manufacturer) were a bit of a surprise. But from what I gather, the number of incidents was extremely small, possibly within the range of random chance. And Samsung pulled the phone entirely simply because they felt the brand name had been too damaged.
Normally I'd agree with you. But in this case the instigator was the wife - she refused to take her husband's wishes into account in her initial decision to take the bus. The husband is merely adopting a tit-for-tat strategy - refusing to take her wishes into account if she does not take his wishes into account. Tit-for-tat has been proven to be one of the best solutions to the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma problem, maximizing the positive outcome for both parties despite its slightly confrontational nature.
That graph is extremely deceptive because the scale starts at $250, not $0.
Travelocity was the first online direct flight booking site that gave you access to most of the airlines. It was a spinoff from Sabre, the company which managed the airline reservation system that airlines and travel agents used. It didn't begin operating online until 1996
The vast majority of the ticket price drop ($600 to $400) happened before 1996. From 1996 to present there's only bee about a $50 ($400 to $350).
So the Internet is only responsible for about 1/5 of the drop in your chart. Or (starting with a 1996 baseline) a 12% drop in prices.
Number of tickets sold peaked in the early 2000s at over 1.5 billion, and has been on a very gradual decline to around 1.3 billion per year since then (for North America).
The inflation-adjusted cost of a movie ticket soared in the 1960s. So you could argue this either way - that the new price is the new norm, or that the theaters have been gouging us for 50 years. I wasn't around in the 1960s so can't really speculate as to what caused the rise in prices then. But in the last 40 years I suspect the advent of cable TV and VCRs/DVDs, and now streaming has forced theaters into a higher-priced niche. They're now more about a viewing experience (e.g. IMAX, THX, 3D) rather than merely watching the movie.
Which brings us to an important point. You can't judge how well the movie industry is doing solely on theater ticket sales. Subscription services (e.g. HBO), and disc and digital sales and rentals are an important part of their revenue today. From what I could gather, theater ticket sales only account for about a third of the industry's revenue.
The publishing industry needs to be forced to modernize, so we can put ebooks in libraries. Purges due to limited space, copies only being available at other libraries instead of onsite, not having "complete" collections, and lack of funds to maintain books that sit on shelves but are rarely looked at - none of these have been real-world factors since the 1990s. Unless some archaic industry has been deliberately fighting technology which reduces cost and improves ease of distribution.
Of the 12 games in their platinum category, half (CS:GO, DOTA 2, Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Grand Theft Auto V, and Rocket League) came out before 2016 (though Fallout 4 had a Nov 2015 release so kinda falls into both years).
Same things with the 12 games in the gold category. Only 4 were released in 2016, 2 in late 2015. And only 5 of the 16 games in the silver category were released in 2016 or late 2015.
Message to game companies: Good older games with long-term playability make as much money as new games with big advertising budgets which are just a flash in the pan. So don't rush it - take the time to playtest it and do it right.
5G promises to be the first modern standard where LTE could in theory completely replace 2-way radio communication including features such as call priority, preemption, and incredibly short call setup times.
Erm, I make VoIP calls using Google Voice over 4G LTE all the time. And I'm on Sprint so my LTE speeds aren't as good as what you'll usually get with the other 3 major carriers. Heck, on a good day I could make VoIP calls while on 3G. VoIP only needs about 100 kbps; the extra bandwidth is just to insure interference doesn't cause an audio dropout. Latency is annoying, but not really a problem. Back in the landline days we used to have a half second latency when making long distance calls via cables across the Pacific (or bounced off geosynchronous satellites).
Now video calls... those require a good 4G connection. On a poor 4G connection it'll drop to like 3 fps, and is unusable with 3G.
In the days before social media, we simply called this "gossip" rather than "fake news". The problem isn't Facebook, or Google, or the New York Times, or BBC, or any of the other organizations people seem all too eager to blame.
The problem is us. People have this bad tendency to give too much credibility to unconfirmed information sources. Especially if what that source is telling us is something we want to believe is true (which is why the left is eating up all the fake news about Russia hacking the election, while the right is eating up all the fake news about illegal immigrants voting in the election). All newspapers and later the Internet and social media do is give more leverage for a single person or organization to spread their gossip to more people.
For that reason, fining Facebook or shutting down news organizations isn't the solution. All that does is hide the problem. The gossip still gets spread, albeit less effectively, by word of mouth (or by email/text today). To address the problem, you have to train people to be cautiously critical about stories that they hear or see, whether it's from a friend of a friend, from a social media site, or on the TV news. Unfortunately, it's suicidal for a democratic government to point the finger of blame at the voters who elected it into power. So they create bogeymen out of easy targets like Facebook and blame them for the problem.
Anyone else notice the glaring sexism in the media coverage of this story about purported sexism in programming culture?
"get pull requests accepted more (except when you know they're women)."
When it seems like men are getting preferential treatment, the story is portrayed as discrimination against women.
"Women write better code, study suggests"
When it seems like women are getting preferential treatment, the story is portrayed as women being superior.
I propose journalists be forced to write these stories without knowing ahead of time which gender came out on top in a study. After the story has been written, the editor can go back and insert the proper gender-specific word or pronoun.
Might've been that way since the 1970s too, but I was in elementary school then.
The game review magazines (now sites) need advance copies of the games to review them in a timely manner.
No advance copies = review comes out a week or more after the game is released = nobody bothers reading it = bankrupt reviewer.
To get an advance copy requires the game developer send you a copy.
If you pan a game in your review, the developer is less likely to send you an advance copy of their next game.
So magazine and website game reviews tend to be biased in favor of the games.
I suspect indie games are panned more partly because they do tend to be worse (low budget and all), but also because a lot of reviewers use them as an opportunity to vent their frustrations about not being allowed to say what they really think about a game.
Since about 2000 I've relied mostly on the opinions of friends and people on forums, rather than reviews. So I don't buy games the day they're released (need a few weeks or months for online communities to build up a consensus), and I never pre-order anymore. I'll still read reviews for things like features in the game (though gameplay videos on YouTube have mostly replaced that). But I usually ignore the reviewer's opinion about a game, unless the opinion is negative.
The previous iteration of their proprietary SSD had encrypted communications. It took OWC over a year to reverse-engineer it and offer compatible SSD upgrades. I guess Apple took that as a sign that they needed to eliminate any possibility of a third party upgrade. After all, you can't have customers modifying their hardware to their liking.
Sigh. Apple does not have battery battery technology. Heck, they don't even make the Macbooks. Quanta does, and Quanta also makes laptops for all the other major brands.
Apple's battery life advantage is because of the limited number of hardware configurations they have to support. They can fine-tune OS X to run on a few dozen models with minimal power use. Windows has to support millions if not billiions of possible hardware combinations, so a lot of times has to sacrifice power-thriftiness in order to maintain compatibility.
And you can't just straight out compare battery life between laptops. Different laptops place a different priority on battery life. So some laptops simply come with smaller batteries since they're aimed at customers who don't care as much about battery life. But if you did want to compare how power-thrifty laptops are, historically several models outlast the Macbooks in terms of minutes per Wh of battery. Topping the list is, not surprisingly, the Microsoft Surface Pro. Like the Macbooks, putting the OS-maker in charge of picking the hardware allows Microsoft to fine-tune Windows to work best with the hardware.
There isn't infinite demand for $1 million housing. If you put up a luxury highrise with units priced at $1 million, and 50 tenants move in, that's 50 fewer people looking to spend $1 million on a house. That decreased demand will lower house prices slightly in the rest of the city. In fact, to decrease housing cost the most, you want to get the rich people off the market first. There are a lot fewer rich people looking to buy a home than middle- or low-income people, so you're operating on a steeper portion of the price/persons curve (basically a bar graph of every person sorted by how much home they can afford). So a single luxury highrise will have a greater impact on lowering the median home cost outside of that highrise, than a highrise with $300k housing.
You browse the web, right? Every website you visit with that little 'f' icon (hey look at the upper right corner of the slashdot page!) is running a little script courtesy of Facebook. The moment you load that page, Facebook knows you visited it. If you don't have a FB account, they don't know who you are (yet), but based on cookies, flash cookies, or other signatures unique to your browser and computer, they know that user 1348752983 (in their database) reads slashdot, and on Dec 30, 2016 @ 12:39 am made a post under the name "I'm New Around Here" (1154723).
Then one day your friend (who is on Facebook) sends you an email with a video invite to her birthday party. You click to play the video. The video is hosted by Facebook, and now based on your click-through, Facebook knows your email address. Based on their cookie stored in your browser, they now know that your email address is user 1348752983, and all the other info they've been collecting about you is now linked to your email address in their servers. Based on your email and other data they have, they deduce your name, cross-reference that to this info they're buying from other services. And now they know your full name, age, address, where you work, roughly how much you make, which high school you went to, who you're dating,
They know all this even though you don't have a Facebook account. Crap like this is why I started browsing everything in incognito/private mode, in addition to the half dozen script, cookie, and tracker blockers I run. I'm not really a private person (the government has my fingerprints and iris scans thanks to the Nexus program I had to join to work crossing the border every day). I just do this because of the principle of the thing - if you want to be gathering info like this about me, at least have the decency to ask for my permission first. Otherwise you're just a digital stalker. And stalking should not be a legitimate business model.
All of this will happen again, given how backwards and recalcitrant the movie/music industries are when it comes to new technology.
They said the exact same thing about the VCR. They fought it tooth and nail, were forced to accept it by the courts, and a couple decades later most of their revenue came from videotape and later DVD sales and rentals instead of theater releases. They fought movie rentals tooth and nail, were forced to accept it by the courts, and a decade later something like half of their revenue came from movie rentals. They fought DAT (digital audio tape) tooth and nail, actually won and succeeded in making the product fail in the market. Only to be overwhelmed by the inevitable tide of technological progress as CD-Rs and eventually MP3/FLAC served the same function as DAT.
He was referring to illegal immigrants. Unfortunately, the press as a whole - the ones going on the whole tirade about "fake" news - has decided to call them "undocumented" immigrants. Which is probably what led to your confusion since most people are unfamiliar with that word in this context, so tend to ignore it. (Which is probably why the press is doing it - to try to shape policy by confusing people into conflating illegal immigrants with legal immigrants. It worked on you.)
There's a lot of reasons to dislike Trump, but this isn't one of them. If you're upset about it, direct your anger at the press which intentionally misled you. I'm wondering why people making unauthorized withdrawls at the bank and unlicensed executioners aren't getting the same treatment from them.
Or maybe it's because Note 7 sales only accounted for 0.6% of 3Q 2016 Android sales. (2 million Note 7s vs 328.6 million Android handsets sold (autoplay video warning). Yes, Android sales for the quarter were nearly 1.5x the iPhone's typical sales for a year. 2016 sales figures aren't in yet, but in 2015 Android sold 1.2 billion units. The Note 7 sales would only be 0.17% of that.
The only people who make a big deal about the Note 7 fiasco are Note 7 owners, Samsung stockholders, and Apple fanboys (where TFA comes from). Compared to Android's overall sales, Note 7 sales were a drop in the bucket. Every single Note 7 owner could've switched to iPhones and you would've needed 3 significant figures to even notice.
The $500k homes are expensive because they're on prime real estate. The $100k-$200k homes are for the large part identical to the $500k homes, they're just in less desirable locations.
There is plenty of open land in the U.S. You can always build more cheap homes in less desirable locations (unless your city has done something like silly like created no-build open space preserves in all possible surrounding areas where new housing could've been built to ease demand). That's why they don't appreciate much - there's always more supply being created to meet growing demand. But aside from the formation of a new city, you can't create new prime real estate. Its supply is fixed, while demand is increasing. So its value appreciates a lot faster.
the Tesla Autopilot triggering on sudden deceleration of the second car ahead, which is not clearly visible from the dashcam view (and presumably equally not clearly visible to the driver). It appears that autopilot warns and brakes.
It looks to me like the poor quality of the video makes it harder to see the second car ahead than it would be in real life. The car which suddenly stopped looks like it's a minivan, and even with the low resolution of the video, at the moment the warning system beeps you can clearly see its dark outline above and beside the red car which collides into it. So it should easily have been visible to the Tesla driver. You can also barely make out the brake lights of the red car light up a moment after the Tesla warning beeps, indicating the red car driver reacted about as fast as a human could to the danger. He was just driving too close to the minivan (looks like he was trying to pass the car on the right) and unable to stop in time.
Since it looks like the Tesla was following about 1.5 seconds behind the red car (count the intervening seconds as they pass the pole on the right), the Tesla driver should have had plenty of time to stop simply from seeing the red car's brake lights go on. The minivan's brake lights would've gone on too and were probably visible to the Tesla driver. It's just impossible to see due to the low resolution of the video and the red of the car in between washing it out.
That's not to dismiss the benefits of these automatic braking systems. If the red car had had it, it might have stopped in time (would need to know the closing rate between it and the minivan to be sure, and the video is so blurry it's impossible to guess that). But I don't think the Tesla system helped the Tesla avoid the accident, unless the Tesla driver was distracted and the warning was the only reason he looked at the road.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the Hollywood studios who make the artificial distinction between DVD/Blu-ray rentals and streaming rentals. They're both ways to get the same bits to your TV, just one does it on a plastic disc, the other does it over wires. But since Hollywood controls the supply and has contsitutional rights to control "distribution", their illogical world-view is what counts. So Netflix (and other rental/streaming companies) have to negotiate separate licenses for rental rights vs. streaming rights. And Hollywood execs have this weird world-view where there must be a delay between theater releases, followed by pay-per-view releases, followed by disc sales, followed by subscription services, followed by syndication on TV. So streaming selection (lumped with subscription services) will always be a step behind disc rentals (which are lumped with disc sales).
Also, the poor Netflix support for Android was also because of Hollywood. They're extremely picky about authorizing ways to decrypt streamed movies. There are basically two ways - a hardware device, and a software device. Software authorization is what's used when you stream Netflix (or Hulu, or HBO Go) on a browser. Hollywood requires the software be run in an encrypted virtual machine with the video stream piped directly to the display, so there's no way for the end user to grab the decrypted video stream and save it. This means special video decoding hardware built into GPUs can't be used, since the encrypted VM runs entirely in the CPU. Phones and tablet CPUs aren't yet powerful enough to do 1080p video decryption in the CPU. So Netflix had to make the Netflix app use the GPU's video decode hardware on Android and iOS. But that meant they had to get their app authorized as a hardware device. For iOS this was relatively easy since there only about a half dozen new iOS devices released each year. It was an entirely different story for Android since there are hundreds if not over a thousand Android devices released each year. Netflix had to get Hollywood's authorization for running the Netflix app on each one of these different Android devices one at a time.
1080p Blu-ray was encrypted by HDCP. Intel somehow lost the master key, allowing anyone to decode any past and future content encoded with HDCP 2.1 or earlier. The studios' response was to create an entirely new, not backwards-compatible HDCP 2.2 around the time the HDMI 4k video standard (HDMI 2.0) was released. Unfortunately they did it late, so there was about a 1-year gap when 4k equipment was sold with HDMI 2.0 capability, but not HDCP 2.2. This meant that these 4k TVs and Blu-ray players could not play commercial 4k Blu-rays. If you burned your own 4k movies to Blu-ray they would play, but not the stuff Hollywood released. I spent a lot of time warning people not to buy 4k equipment that first year, and warning them to be careful to check for "HDCP 2.2" in the specs that second year. Hollywood doesn't care if your TV/Blu-ray player doesn't work. They just want their crap protected.
HDCP 2.2 was broken in late 2015. Not sure if it was cracked or someone just made a device using a legit HDCP 2.2 decryption key. But if it was cracked, we're probably going to go through all this again. Hollywood will insist a new not backwards-compatible HDCP 2.3, and it will be used to encode all future Blu-rays starting with 8k releases.
They also enjoy double- or triple-dipping: charging you full price for a license to the same movie in different formats. Same with the record studios, who had no qualms about charging your for the same song on vinyl, tape, and CD. The software industry gets this right - they let you upgrade at a discounted price if you own a previous version. This reflects the reality that you already purchased a license for the previous versions, and thus the new version is only giving you some new functionality instead of entirely new functionality. But Hollywood has self-deluded themselves into thinking that their product is a license when it's convenient for them if it's a license, and a product when it's convenient for them if it's a product. So will charge you full price even if you've already purchased licenses for the movie three times at 360i (VHS), 525i (DVD), and 1080p.
People need to stop putting up with this crap and demand lower-price upgrade licenses for content they've already paid for. IMHO a lot of piracy would disappear if the studios simply adopted pricing which better reflected reality. Most people want to pay content creators for their work, but not if they judge that the content creators are trying to rip them off. The whole fiasco with Windows XP support contracts is a great example. Microsoft pushed support contracts for XP hard and lots of companies signed up. Instead of buying XP, they were buying 3 years of Windows support, which would include XP and an upgrade to the next version of Windows (new versions normally come out about every 3 years). Unfortunately Vista got delayed and wasn't released until 5.5 years after XP - outside the support contract period these companies had paid for. There was hell to pay, with many companies believing Microsoft deliberately delayed Vista so they wouldn't have to fulfil that portion of the contract. Even though Microsoft eventually relented and gave these companies Vista, many of them will never buy a support contract or subscription software from Microsoft again. Because they judge it to be unfairly skewed in favor of the supplier.
The Core M processor is actually a dual core mobile Core i7 (4MB of cache instead of 3MB like the i3 and i5). Its primary distinction is that it's binned to operate at extremely low power, and it has aggressive thermal throttling (to keep it within the TDP window). That's why you'll see the Core M outperform the mobile i5 on certain benchmarks - if the benchmark is short enough that thermal throttling doesn't kick in, the Core M's 4MB cache allows it to outpace the i5 and its 3MB cache.
There was more to complain about with the very first gen Core M (Broadwell). Those would only turbo boost on a single core. If you were doing something which used both cores, it was stuck at its base clock speed which was pretty low (800 MHz to 1.2 GHz). But starting with Skylake they'll all turbo boost on both cores.
I would never get one because I do lots of things which require sustained CPU capability (gaming, compiling, number crunching, data processing, etc). But for the 95% of the population who only needs bursty CPU power for web browsing and firing off tweets and Facebook posts, it's pretty ideal. I got one for my dad and he loves it - the extremely long battery life and lack of fan noise (no fan to make noise) are big pluses in his book.
Intel has begun mixing it up lately though - some of the newer dual core mobile i5s have 4MB cache, some 3MB. It's getting to the point where you need to look up the exact CPU model before buying.
The way Intel, Samsung, and TSMC measure transistor size isn't the same. Some of Intel's 22nm transistor structures were smaller than TSMC's 16nm. I do agree Intel's lead has shrunk, but just because one process is called 14nm and another 10nm doesn't really matter - transistor density and production yields are what are important.
Samsung's battery division is new, and the Note 7 battery was their first major production battery. So no, you wouldn't really expect their engineers to know within 2 weeks what the problem was. Li-ion batteries are extremely temperamental, and it may be a problem other battery manufacturers learned about and designed around 10 years ago but which blindsided Samsung's engineers.
The fires in the "fixed" Note 7s (which used a battery from an established Chinese manufacturer) were a bit of a surprise. But from what I gather, the number of incidents was extremely small, possibly within the range of random chance. And Samsung pulled the phone entirely simply because they felt the brand name had been too damaged.
Normally I'd agree with you. But in this case the instigator was the wife - she refused to take her husband's wishes into account in her initial decision to take the bus. The husband is merely adopting a tit-for-tat strategy - refusing to take her wishes into account if she does not take his wishes into account. Tit-for-tat has been proven to be one of the best solutions to the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma problem, maximizing the positive outcome for both parties despite its slightly confrontational nature.
So the Internet is only responsible for about 1/5 of the drop in your chart. Or (starting with a 1996 baseline) a 12% drop in prices.
The main factor which caused the drop in prices was deregulating the airlines in 1978.
Number of tickets sold peaked in the early 2000s at over 1.5 billion, and has been on a very gradual decline to around 1.3 billion per year since then (for North America).
The inflation-adjusted cost of a movie ticket soared in the 1960s. So you could argue this either way - that the new price is the new norm, or that the theaters have been gouging us for 50 years. I wasn't around in the 1960s so can't really speculate as to what caused the rise in prices then. But in the last 40 years I suspect the advent of cable TV and VCRs/DVDs, and now streaming has forced theaters into a higher-priced niche. They're now more about a viewing experience (e.g. IMAX, THX, 3D) rather than merely watching the movie.
Which brings us to an important point. You can't judge how well the movie industry is doing solely on theater ticket sales. Subscription services (e.g. HBO), and disc and digital sales and rentals are an important part of their revenue today. From what I could gather, theater ticket sales only account for about a third of the industry's revenue.
The publishing industry needs to be forced to modernize, so we can put ebooks in libraries. Purges due to limited space, copies only being available at other libraries instead of onsite, not having "complete" collections, and lack of funds to maintain books that sit on shelves but are rarely looked at - none of these have been real-world factors since the 1990s. Unless some archaic industry has been deliberately fighting technology which reduces cost and improves ease of distribution.
Of the 12 games in their platinum category, half (CS:GO, DOTA 2, Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Grand Theft Auto V, and Rocket League) came out before 2016 (though Fallout 4 had a Nov 2015 release so kinda falls into both years).
Same things with the 12 games in the gold category. Only 4 were released in 2016, 2 in late 2015. And only 5 of the 16 games in the silver category were released in 2016 or late 2015.
Message to game companies: Good older games with long-term playability make as much money as new games with big advertising budgets which are just a flash in the pan. So don't rush it - take the time to playtest it and do it right.
Erm, I make VoIP calls using Google Voice over 4G LTE all the time. And I'm on Sprint so my LTE speeds aren't as good as what you'll usually get with the other 3 major carriers. Heck, on a good day I could make VoIP calls while on 3G. VoIP only needs about 100 kbps; the extra bandwidth is just to insure interference doesn't cause an audio dropout. Latency is annoying, but not really a problem. Back in the landline days we used to have a half second latency when making long distance calls via cables across the Pacific (or bounced off geosynchronous satellites).
Now video calls... those require a good 4G connection. On a poor 4G connection it'll drop to like 3 fps, and is unusable with 3G.
In the days before social media, we simply called this "gossip" rather than "fake news". The problem isn't Facebook, or Google, or the New York Times, or BBC, or any of the other organizations people seem all too eager to blame.
The problem is us. People have this bad tendency to give too much credibility to unconfirmed information sources. Especially if what that source is telling us is something we want to believe is true (which is why the left is eating up all the fake news about Russia hacking the election, while the right is eating up all the fake news about illegal immigrants voting in the election). All newspapers and later the Internet and social media do is give more leverage for a single person or organization to spread their gossip to more people.
For that reason, fining Facebook or shutting down news organizations isn't the solution. All that does is hide the problem. The gossip still gets spread, albeit less effectively, by word of mouth (or by email/text today). To address the problem, you have to train people to be cautiously critical about stories that they hear or see, whether it's from a friend of a friend, from a social media site, or on the TV news. Unfortunately, it's suicidal for a democratic government to point the finger of blame at the voters who elected it into power. So they create bogeymen out of easy targets like Facebook and blame them for the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watership_Down_(miniseries)
http://www.comingsoon.net/tv/news/681125-animated-watership-down-mini-series-coming-from-bbc-and-netflix
http://deadline.com/2016/04/watership-down-miniseries-john-boyega-james-mcavoy-bbc-netflix-1201745167/
When it seems like men are getting preferential treatment, the story is portrayed as discrimination against women.
When it seems like women are getting preferential treatment, the story is portrayed as women being superior.
I propose journalists be forced to write these stories without knowing ahead of time which gender came out on top in a study. After the story has been written, the editor can go back and insert the proper gender-specific word or pronoun.
Since about 2000 I've relied mostly on the opinions of friends and people on forums, rather than reviews. So I don't buy games the day they're released (need a few weeks or months for online communities to build up a consensus), and I never pre-order anymore. I'll still read reviews for things like features in the game (though gameplay videos on YouTube have mostly replaced that). But I usually ignore the reviewer's opinion about a game, unless the opinion is negative.
You're behind the times. The newest Macbook Pros have their NAND storage soldered to the mainboard.
The previous iteration of their proprietary SSD had encrypted communications. It took OWC over a year to reverse-engineer it and offer compatible SSD upgrades. I guess Apple took that as a sign that they needed to eliminate any possibility of a third party upgrade. After all, you can't have customers modifying their hardware to their liking.
Sigh. Apple does not have battery battery technology. Heck, they don't even make the Macbooks. Quanta does, and Quanta also makes laptops for all the other major brands.
Apple's battery life advantage is because of the limited number of hardware configurations they have to support. They can fine-tune OS X to run on a few dozen models with minimal power use. Windows has to support millions if not billiions of possible hardware combinations, so a lot of times has to sacrifice power-thriftiness in order to maintain compatibility.
And you can't just straight out compare battery life between laptops. Different laptops place a different priority on battery life. So some laptops simply come with smaller batteries since they're aimed at customers who don't care as much about battery life. But if you did want to compare how power-thrifty laptops are, historically several models outlast the Macbooks in terms of minutes per Wh of battery. Topping the list is, not surprisingly, the Microsoft Surface Pro. Like the Macbooks, putting the OS-maker in charge of picking the hardware allows Microsoft to fine-tune Windows to work best with the hardware.
There isn't infinite demand for $1 million housing. If you put up a luxury highrise with units priced at $1 million, and 50 tenants move in, that's 50 fewer people looking to spend $1 million on a house. That decreased demand will lower house prices slightly in the rest of the city. In fact, to decrease housing cost the most, you want to get the rich people off the market first. There are a lot fewer rich people looking to buy a home than middle- or low-income people, so you're operating on a steeper portion of the price/persons curve (basically a bar graph of every person sorted by how much home they can afford). So a single luxury highrise will have a greater impact on lowering the median home cost outside of that highrise, than a highrise with $300k housing.
You browse the web, right? Every website you visit with that little 'f' icon (hey look at the upper right corner of the slashdot page!) is running a little script courtesy of Facebook. The moment you load that page, Facebook knows you visited it. If you don't have a FB account, they don't know who you are (yet), but based on cookies, flash cookies, or other signatures unique to your browser and computer, they know that user 1348752983 (in their database) reads slashdot, and on Dec 30, 2016 @ 12:39 am made a post under the name "I'm New Around Here" (1154723).
Then one day your friend (who is on Facebook) sends you an email with a video invite to her birthday party. You click to play the video. The video is hosted by Facebook, and now based on your click-through, Facebook knows your email address. Based on their cookie stored in your browser, they now know that your email address is user 1348752983, and all the other info they've been collecting about you is now linked to your email address in their servers. Based on your email and other data they have, they deduce your name, cross-reference that to this info they're buying from other services. And now they know your full name, age, address, where you work, roughly how much you make, which high school you went to, who you're dating,
They know all this even though you don't have a Facebook account. Crap like this is why I started browsing everything in incognito/private mode, in addition to the half dozen script, cookie, and tracker blockers I run. I'm not really a private person (the government has my fingerprints and iris scans thanks to the Nexus program I had to join to work crossing the border every day). I just do this because of the principle of the thing - if you want to be gathering info like this about me, at least have the decency to ask for my permission first. Otherwise you're just a digital stalker. And stalking should not be a legitimate business model.
All of this will happen again, given how backwards and recalcitrant the movie/music industries are when it comes to new technology.
They said the exact same thing about the VCR. They fought it tooth and nail, were forced to accept it by the courts, and a couple decades later most of their revenue came from videotape and later DVD sales and rentals instead of theater releases. They fought movie rentals tooth and nail, were forced to accept it by the courts, and a decade later something like half of their revenue came from movie rentals. They fought DAT (digital audio tape) tooth and nail, actually won and succeeded in making the product fail in the market. Only to be overwhelmed by the inevitable tide of technological progress as CD-Rs and eventually MP3/FLAC served the same function as DAT.
He was referring to illegal immigrants. Unfortunately, the press as a whole - the ones going on the whole tirade about "fake" news - has decided to call them "undocumented" immigrants. Which is probably what led to your confusion since most people are unfamiliar with that word in this context, so tend to ignore it. (Which is probably why the press is doing it - to try to shape policy by confusing people into conflating illegal immigrants with legal immigrants. It worked on you.)
There's a lot of reasons to dislike Trump, but this isn't one of them. If you're upset about it, direct your anger at the press which intentionally misled you. I'm wondering why people making unauthorized withdrawls at the bank and unlicensed executioners aren't getting the same treatment from them.
Or maybe it's because Note 7 sales only accounted for 0.6% of 3Q 2016 Android sales. (2 million Note 7s vs 328.6 million Android handsets sold (autoplay video warning). Yes, Android sales for the quarter were nearly 1.5x the iPhone's typical sales for a year. 2016 sales figures aren't in yet, but in 2015 Android sold 1.2 billion units. The Note 7 sales would only be 0.17% of that.
The only people who make a big deal about the Note 7 fiasco are Note 7 owners, Samsung stockholders, and Apple fanboys (where TFA comes from). Compared to Android's overall sales, Note 7 sales were a drop in the bucket. Every single Note 7 owner could've switched to iPhones and you would've needed 3 significant figures to even notice.
Average reader: "What's 'elliptical' mean?"
As much as I hate to say it, this bit of dumbing down is probably warranted.
The $500k homes are expensive because they're on prime real estate. The $100k-$200k homes are for the large part identical to the $500k homes, they're just in less desirable locations.
There is plenty of open land in the U.S. You can always build more cheap homes in less desirable locations (unless your city has done something like silly like created no-build open space preserves in all possible surrounding areas where new housing could've been built to ease demand). That's why they don't appreciate much - there's always more supply being created to meet growing demand. But aside from the formation of a new city, you can't create new prime real estate. Its supply is fixed, while demand is increasing. So its value appreciates a lot faster.
It looks to me like the poor quality of the video makes it harder to see the second car ahead than it would be in real life. The car which suddenly stopped looks like it's a minivan, and even with the low resolution of the video, at the moment the warning system beeps you can clearly see its dark outline above and beside the red car which collides into it. So it should easily have been visible to the Tesla driver. You can also barely make out the brake lights of the red car light up a moment after the Tesla warning beeps, indicating the red car driver reacted about as fast as a human could to the danger. He was just driving too close to the minivan (looks like he was trying to pass the car on the right) and unable to stop in time.
Since it looks like the Tesla was following about 1.5 seconds behind the red car (count the intervening seconds as they pass the pole on the right), the Tesla driver should have had plenty of time to stop simply from seeing the red car's brake lights go on. The minivan's brake lights would've gone on too and were probably visible to the Tesla driver. It's just impossible to see due to the low resolution of the video and the red of the car in between washing it out.
That's not to dismiss the benefits of these automatic braking systems. If the red car had had it, it might have stopped in time (would need to know the closing rate between it and the minivan to be sure, and the video is so blurry it's impossible to guess that). But I don't think the Tesla system helped the Tesla avoid the accident, unless the Tesla driver was distracted and the warning was the only reason he looked at the road.