I'll add that spreading baseless conclusions like TFA that a company (Google in this case) is in fact selling off your email address can turn good companies bad. If Google is not selling your email address to spammers, but after enough negative publicity everyone thinks they are, they might just decide what the hell. People are blaming us for selling out anyway, so why don't we just sell out for real and at least make some money off it since we're taking the blame either way.
If you're going to publish conclusions, back it up with evidence. Otherwise you're just purveying rumor and gossip. I have two email addresses hosted by Gmail (I got my personal domain in on Google Apps for Business when it was free), and have never received any spam at them related to my web browsing. Furthermore, I own my own domain and create an email alias specific to each company when I sign up for their services (company_name@mydomain.com). I have never received any spam at google@mydomain.com.
I've been trying to figure out if this patent covers something ARM implemented, or something Apple added when they modified the ARM A7 and A8 processor designs for their own devices. That is, did UWM sue Apple as a proxy and a prelude to suing every other company out there using an ARM processor? Which would be a huge deal. Or does the reach of this patent end here (other than eliminating predictive branch ordering from future processors until the patent expires)? Which is not very newsworthy except for Apple.
Unfortunately all the news articles I've found on it so far are written at the level of a jury of non-technical people, and provide no information which could answer this really important question. Maybe someone here has come across a better article?
Firewire flopped because Apple charged $1 per port to anyone else wishing to implement it. USB was free. Which brings this discussion back full circle to whether patents are helping or stifling technological progress.
Because they're not much of an innovator. This is not a troll. They've never been terribly good at inventing brand new things.
Agree with everything you said except this part. They're not a hardware innovator. If you've opened up Macbooks to repair them, you'll find the same commodity parts used by every other laptop manufacturer. Heck, they're not even made by Apple, they're made by Quanta, an ODM (original design manufacturer - like an OEM except they also design the product). You wouldn't believe the number of people I've had to argue with about that; they seem to think Macbooks contain Apple-brand fairy dust and unicorn horn powder inside It's like telling a kid Santa doesn't exist when I tell them the CPU is by Intel, the awesome-performing SSD is by hated Samsung, the memory by Micron, the screen by LG, etc. Those are the companies doing the true hardware innovation; Apple is just buying and reselling their products.
But the one area Apple is really good at and really does innovate in is software. The iPod for example was successful mostly because of its tight integration with iTunes. Before that, it was a PITA to convert the music files on your computer into playlists on your MP3 player. Most involved connecting your MP3 player to your computer and dragging and dropping the individual MP3s, converting playlist files, automatic sorting via artist names stored in the MP3 (or not stored if you ripped it yourself), alphabetical sorting which sometimes got messed up depending on upper and lower case names, songs which disappeared because they were buried in the folder structure, etc. Before iTunes became a bloated mess, Apple nailed how synchronization of your music collection across devices should work. Likewise, Time Machine is the best UI I've seen on a backup program. The Macbooks are considered to have the best trackpads not because they're physically better but because they have the best software. The software augments the usability of the hardware enough to catapult the hardware into success.
Smartphones: IBM invented the concept of the toucscreen only phone in 1993. Nokia had this device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... AT&T pretty much nailed the real concept of a smartphone http://www.xorl.org/people/njh... as one might recognise it with a decent UI and apps, except it needed a remote application server, too much connectivity and generally the tech wasn't up to it in 1998. Heck, they weren't even the first to put multitouch on a phone.
There should have been no occasion to hit two security employees and a company ATV because those should have been nowhere near the reporters' vehicle or path of egress.
There should have been no occasion to hit two security employees and a company ATV because the reporters shouldn't have been on the property in the first place. Regardless of how the situation escalated, the incident was ultimately precipitated by the reporters trespassing.
Tesla's security strikes me as being in the same boat as I was. They don't have the authority to stop someone from leaving the property.
The original infraction was trespassing. The obvious resolution for trespassing is to get the trespasser off the property. Charging them with criminal trespass is secondary. So whether the security guards had authority to stop someone from leaving the property was irrelevant - their primary goal should've been to get the reporters to leave. Which they were apparently trying to do at the time the injuries were sustained, when the guards tried to stop them.
If the security cameras in place were insufficient to grab a license plate and photos of the trespassers' faces, then that should've been something for the security guards to bring up at the next manager's meeting so it could be addressed in the future. We're not talking about thieves making off with the crown jewels, we're talking about a couple guys being where they're not supposed to be (at the time of the incident the security guards probably had no way to know these were reporters - anyone can print out an official-looking ID). There was no need for heroics on the part of the security guards. Chasing the reporters out should have been sufficient this time, with the incident providing ammo for the guards' request for better cameras and (perhaps) a gate at the entrance.
I've managed a 50 acre resort and have had to deal with trespassers (mostly high school kids from the neighborhood sneaking into the pool). The vast majority of them leave when asked. There is no reason to escalate the situation unless they refuse to leave or start destroying property. Unless they are causing or have caused physical damage, I really don't understand why you would want to stop them from leaving. Even if they cuss at you and flip you off, there's no reason to escalate things - being a jerk is not a crime.
Sure, if I own the car it should do only what I want it to when I want it to, but why should I own a car at all? I use a car only a few times a month, driving maybe 5000 miles/year total. Why should I spend $30,000 on a depreciating asset and devote 200 sq ft of space towards housing it.
I want to call a car and have it come when I want it, take me where I want to go, then go away until I need it again.
This is purely a cost-benefit analysis, and what's true for you will not be true for others.
If you purchase the car new for $30,000 (smart people don't, but we're talking the typical car buyer here), use it for 5 years, and sell it for $15,000, it depreciates an average of $3000/yr.
The average car in the U.S. is driven 12,000 miles/yr. Gas for 12,000 miles/yr, at 25 MPG and $3/gal, works out to $1440/yr
Maintenance and insurance is around $2500/yr (mine and maybe yours is a lot less, but we're talking the typical, median driver here with an accident or two on his record).
Total cost of ownership is then $6940yr, or $0.578/mi, which is almost exactly the IRS reimbursement figure of $0.575/mi so we're on pretty solid footing here. If you use the car on 300 days out of the year, that's $23.13/day.
Can you do everything you usually do in a typical day of driving the car for $23.13? If you live in a city with good public transportation, the answer is probably yes (ignoring the cost of time you have to wait for said public transportation). If you have to rely on taxis, the answer is probably no. And if you live outside the city the answer is almost certainly no.
There's also the tragedy of the commons to worry about. I just got back from taking my dog for a walk at the beach, and there's wet sand all over the back seat. Do you really want to get the autonomous car right after I've used it to ferry my dog around? In a taxi, the driver's presence discourages you from abusing the shared asset. You won't get that with an autonomous car unless the car service puts cameras inside them that are always recording. Which would could as a huge negative for a lot of people in the buy vs rent a car argument.
If you can make a car that would drive significantly better then a human (accidents per mile) why wouldn't you?
Because people are irrational. We fear exotic deaths more than we do mundane deaths. Travel by airliner is much safer than travel by car, yet every time there's a plane crash we have a huge investigation for the purpose of figuring out what went wrong so we can prevent it from happening again. But tens of thousands of people die in car accidents, and all they get is a brief police report stating it was an accident without really delving into the cause. Why? Because death by airplane crash is more exotic than death by car crash. The same thing plagues nuclear power. Death by radiation is exotic, death by falling or getting lung cancer from soot inhalation is not. So we scrutinize and heavily regulate everything to do with nuclear power when it's already the safest power source we've ever invented in deaths per MWh of power generated, while turning a blind eye to deaths by coal (pollution), wind, and solar (primarily falls during maintenance - their diffuse nature means there's a lot more maintenance to do).
You double down on this if the accident was in your control vs out of your control. If you could've done something to prevent the accident (was driving a car) but failed to so, you say "Oopsie, I won't make that mistake again. No give me my keys back." If someone else could've done something to prevent the accident (driving a bus or piloting a plane) but failed to do so, you sue the bastard for everything he's got and try to get him banned so he never drives/flies again.
The combination of these two means autonomous cars have to become a helluva lot better than human drivers before they'll be accepted. Dying because of a typo in a line of code counts as really exotic, and the press will have a field day with it the first time it happens. And the makers of the autonomous cars will need huge insurance policies to deal with the extra liability they'll incur, since it'll likely be bigger than the sum total of all private auto liability insurance policies today (a few percent of the purchase price of the vehicle every year it's in operation).
We know an economy with money works. The burden of proof is on the person advocating the hypothesis that an economy without money can work, to provide evidence in support of his hypothesis, not for the person arguing against it to disprove it. Or put another way, if you can provide an example of just one functioning money-less economy, you've proven your hypothesis. Rattling off a list of a million different things which don't affect whether an economy works, money or no money, doesn't prove a thing.
The main reason I can see it not working is because money isn't some "entrenchment of the economic elite." At a fundamental level, money is a representation of productivity. Maybe not a 1.0 correlation, but still correlated. Money is basically what you get in exchange for doing or making something society feels is productive. Which you can then exchange for things other people do or make that you feel is productive. Consequently, when supply does not match demand, the best way to sort who gets some of that limited supply is money - the most productive people. The entire rational for making theft, fraud, and scams illegal is because they deprive others of the fruits of their productivity without providing productivity of their own.
Why not use a bartering system instead? Because money offers more liquidity. If you''ve got eggs to sell, and you need milk, the easiest way to barter it is to find someone selling milk who wants eggs. If you can't find that, you need to find someone selling milk who wants x, then find someone selling x who wants eggs, and work out a 3-way trade. Beyond that the barters start to get more and more complicated, and there's an increased chance the time you spend putting together the barter costs you more than what you're trying to buy.
Money neatly solves this problem by making all barters universal. You exchange the eggs for money, then you can exchange the money for milk. It adds liquidity to the trading system (at the cost of having to maintain the money so its value is stable enough that people aren't afraid to use it as an intermediary instead of doing a straight barter).
It's all a matter of culture and common consensus about value and how things should work.
That's the catch. There is no common consensus about the value of things. There's an average consensus, but not a common consensus. Some people value certain things more than others. When different people value things differently, you need to be able to somehow amalgamate their preferences. The way to do this which gives the most individual freedom (i.e. the method which least requires the person who doesn't value the item to have to contribute to paying for it) is to give each individual their own "money" and put them entirely in control of their own purchases. That's the basis of the free market. (This model breaks down when consequences of that purchase are borne by society, rather than the purchasing individual. e.g. Pollution. More generally classified as tragedy of the commons, or prisoner's dilemma situations. Which is why most successful economies are a mixture of free market and socialist ideals.)
I always figured the "economy" in Star Trek worked because they had access to nearly limitless power (warp cores), and devices which could convert that energy into any form of matter (replicators). Once you get those two, personal productivity becomes moot. You could do manual labor 24 hours/day and it wouldn't generate as much productivity as a fraction of a percent of the output of a warp core. Thus it's just less of a hassle to give everyone what they want and not require them to do productive work. (Items of limited supply aren't really addressed by the show, like how do they decide who gets to live in the prime waterfront apartment in San Francisco?)
Actually, that's a problem too. I manage a small commercial building, and I noticed the electric bill spike one month. Some investigation and it turned out one of the tenants had bought an electric car, and was charging it while he was at work by using an extension cord to plug the car into an outdoor power outlet near the parking lot. That outlet happened to be hooked up to the building's electric meter.
Don't blame nuclear for this one. They didn't give the residents iodine tablets. They distributed the tablets at the time of the accident, but never gave them to the evacuated residents. That's pretty much like if the Titanic had had enough liferafts to save everyone, but after it struck the iceberg they decided not to put anyone aboard the liferafts. Yeah the ship sank, but the deaths were caused by the safety measure in place to save the people aboard not being used, not the sinking itself.
It's a horribly complex technology that it's adherents fucked up badly by not carefully and consistently holding to the highest of engineering standards (like naval reactors). They cheaped out and they are paying the price.
Yup, it's fucked up so badly that it kills fewer people per MWh generated than any other power source, including solar, wind, and hydro. Shame on us for creating the safest form of power generation in the history of mankind.
You can't compare to a vacuum. You can't look at fatalities or injuries caused by a nuclear accident, compare to some hypothetical universe where that nuclear power plant (and only that nuclear power plant) didn't exist, and criticize nuclear power for killing those people. A valid comparison must use opportunity cost. Everything has some danger, some risk of death.. If the nuclear plant hadn't been there, some other type of plant would've had to be there to generate the same amount of electricity. That's the alternative case you have to compare against, not a vacuum. How many deaths would that alternate power plant have caused?
When you crunch the statistics that way, you find that had the nuclear plant been replaced by any other type of power plant, statistically you would've killed more people. Even wind, solar, and hydro are more dangerous. Or put in relative terms, replacing coal, gas, hydro, wind, and solar plants with nuclear plants saves lives.
Is there some compelling reason why these tests aren't being conducted in realistic conditions in the first place?
Basically, political lobbying has forced us into a type of testing which can be conducted by a trained monkey in 10-20 minutes. It's hard to make a realistic test which meets those requirements. Cut and paste from my last post on this topic:
Pulling each car off the road and testing it only makes sense when a large number of cars are not in compliance or in borderline compliance (i.e. might drift out of compliance before the next test). If a test costs $40 and 90% of cars are in compliance with emissions standards, you're paying $400 to detect each car out of compliance. And the test is worth it.
Now what happens when 99.9% of cars are in compliance? You're now paying $40,000 to detect each car out of compliance. At that point (actually long before it) the testing isn't cost-effective anymore. California reached this threshold where the testing was no longer worth it in the early 1990s. Most cars were in compliance, and most of the air pollution was caused by about 1 in 1000 cars (mostly older models) which were spewing out hundreds or thousands of times more emissions than a compliant car.
The companies which make the emissions testing equipment suggested a much more elegant and cost-effective solution. Stop testing each car every year. Put the emissions measuring equipment at various chokepoints on the road like free off-ramps. The equipment would then sniff the air as each car drove by, and when it detected an excessive amount of emissions it would snap a picture of the violating car's license plate. If a certain set of plates was flagged by multiple measuring stations, the State could then send the owner of that car a letter requiring its emissions be tested.
Sounds great! It would've caught the cheating VW cars immediately. So why didn't it happen? The emissions testing itself had become a billion dollar industry. The gas stations and auto mechanics lobbied heavily to keep the mandatory testing in place. For them, a billion dollars a year were on the line. The companies making the detection equipment only stood to make a few tens or hundreds of millions of dollars one time by selling it to the state. You can guess which side won. So we ended up with testing which wastes money and isn't as effective at detecting cheating as other solutions.
I don't understand why we're seeing all these gasoline hybrids instead of diesel ones. Aren't diesels running in their optimum range much more efficient? And with all these emissions issues turning up, isn't it feasible to set up diesel hybrids to basically always run in a narrow range with the best emissions and efficiency possible?
Diesels already almost always run in their optimum range. A car engine basically has three operating states that are important. Accelerating from a stop, cruising (usually at highway speeds), and accelerating at highway speeds (to pass).
Gasoline engines hit peak power and torque at the high-end of their RPM range. That's great for accelerating at highway speeds, not so good for cruising and accelerating from a stop. Because most of the engine's time is spent cruising, that's where you need to optimize fuel burn rate to improve overall fuel efficiency. Gas engines have a lot of problem with this because it's not coincident with their peak power and torque production. Consequently you're having to optimize the engine's performance at two hugely different RPMs. The hybrid helps a lot here because the electric motor provides a lot of torque at 0 RPM for accelerating from a stop (power = torque * RPM * a constant),and allows the gas engine to be shut off completely for a while during cruising. So now you can optimize the gas engine for high-RPM efficiency, and rely on the electric motor for what would normally be low-RPM operation.
Diesel engines have a higher compression ratio so hit peak power and torque at the low-end of their RPM range. That's great for cruising and accelerating from a stop, not so great for accelerating at highway speeds. This is why they're so common in tractor trailers - it's OK if the truck takes a long time to accelerate at highway speeds, but you want good power and fuel efficiency during cruise. Since the diesel engine's peak torque and power happen close to cruise, they're a lot easier to optimize for fuel efficiency.
A hybrid won't actually help much here because it doesn't add much - the diesel engine already has lots of torque close to 0 RPM, and is fuel efficient during cruise. About the only thing a hybrid would add would be regenerative braking. While that's a big deal in city driving, the vast majority of the driving tractor trailers do is on the highway, so again there's little benefit from the hybrid. The best thing to add to a diesel is actually a turbo. Their weakness is power output at higher RPMs, and a turbo provides extra power at the high-end of the RPM range, which improves accelerating to pass at highway speeds - precisely the driving stage diesels normally have problems with.
Isn't that exactly how locomotives work? The popularity of diesel-electric locomotives makes it even more surprising that we don't see the same technology in trucking.
If you compare the power of a diesel-electric locomotive to the weight it's pulling, it's like putting a 5 hp engine on a SUV. If you're ok with having that little power and taking several minutes to get up to full speeds, then yeah a diesel-electric motor makes more sense than putting in a 50-gear transmission. Realistic driving conditions require the truck engine be a lot more powerful, meaning fewer gears needed to accelerate from 0 to highway speeds. And it's cheaper, less complex, and more efficient just to send the power straight to the wheels rather than going with a diesel-electric system.
Which phone? I've got a Nexus 5 on pure Lollipop and it doesn't exhibit that behavior. Pressing the Home button sends you back to your home screen, or locks the device (from the lock screen - I have Smart Lock enabled). Long-pressing it does nothing. Swiping the home button up takes me to the Google Now screen. I think you're dealing with a modification to Android made by a phone manufacturer or carrier.
No, clearly the engine is capable of passing the EPA emissions tests without the urea injection. Otherwise it would've never been approved for sale in the U.S. So the lack of a urea injection system does not prevent the engine from meeting the emissions standards. It merely lowers the engine output you can achieve while complying with emissions standards.
In other words, you could achieve this with a simple software kludge. Not that I believe it was just a couple of rogue software engineers who decided to do this. There's no incentive for a lowly software engineer to do this. Someone higher up had to have directed them to do it.
It's a huge problem in the used market. Or as in this case when both versions are being sold new simultaneously (another example is when the same laptop ships with screens from two different manufacturers with one screen being visibly superior). I mean the whole rationale for Apple's simplified product line is that you only have to consider 2 or 3 models and pick the one you want. That gets thrown out the window if there are significant differences within a model.
I don't really blame Apple in this case, since theoretically the two products should perform nearly identically, and they must've run tests to confirm that prior to receiving batch shipments. I do blame them on their laptops, where it's extremely difficult to tell a 2013 Macbook apart from a 2014 Macbook (you have to enter the serial number into a website). Most of the theory around free markets is predicated on the assumption that the buyers are informed. Withholding information from customers in the name of "simplicity" is a good way to break the market.
The problem with economics isn't the math or the scientific method. The problem is, at its lowest level what happens in economics is based entirely on how all the individual participants in the economy think and act. That is, if your economy were based on a population of deterministic robots whose "decisions" could be predictably be quantified and modeled, then economics would probably by the purest science right after math.
But because the economic actors are humans, many of them with wildly unpredictable and irrational approaches to buying and selling, and prone to media hype and mass terror, economics ends up becoming one of the least-predictable sciences. Even if I can correctly predict with precise accuracy what the price of gold should be, its actual price will be different because it's skewed by people out there who are convinced gold is the only safe investment, or who are convinced gold is garbage.
"presumably it does via Windows 10 activations, which it could easily tally from its logs"
That would be my guess as well but doesn't tell you if any of them kept Windows 10.
Actually, given how invasive Win 10 is, I'm inclined to believe Microsoft knows exactly how many systems are actively running it for daily use. In fact, I'd say that's a statistic they're tracking internally day-to-day since they seem to be staking a lot on their ability to monitor how you're using the OS.
Just like a restaurant which doesn't give a toss about minimum wage, where its ingredients come from, the cleanliness of the kitchens or the reliability of the refrigeration - but the customers love the public face, service and price, so that restaurant should be given a break when it comes to following the rules other restaurants have to abide by...
If you do a lot of traveling, restaurants in most of the world operate exactly that way. You don't exactly see massive reports of food poisoning sickening or killing huge numbers of people who visit such restaurants.
I'm not saying such regulation isn't helpful. I'm only saying that you shouldn't assume that such regulation is always helpful. Over-regulation comes at a cost. The county health inspector assigned to the hotel/restaurant I used to work at was a control freak on a power trip. She wrote us up for several "violations" that she required us to fix or she'd shut us down. Some of them were reasonable (mice had chewed a hole in an exterior door). Others were just plain ridiculous. She required us to install metal flashing around the top of our walk-in refrigerators to enclose the air gap between it and the ceiling, which we did at a cost of several thousand dollars. During our next fire inspection, the fire marshal told us that was a fire code violation and we had to take it down - that space is open specifically so you can immediately see and smell any smoke from a fire that develops in the refrigeration unit. She required us to put sneeze guards on the sides of salad serving carts which abutted against each other (so the sides weren't exposed). We spent weeks trying to a place that sold these, then finally called the manufacturer. They told us that they sold these carts nationwide in thousands of health jurisdictions, and this was the first time anyone had ever inquired about putting sneeze guards on the side. We ended up buying plexiglas sheets and having our maintenance department custom-cut them to fit in the sides of said carts to make our inspector happy.
Personally I'm on the anti-Uber side of this. I do think regulation of the taxi industry serves a beneficial purpose. However, I support Uber in challenging the status quo. That is, I refuse to condemn Uber "just because" they are upsetting the existing taxicab business and regulation model. Said model has developed slowly over a hundred years. It's probably high time we shook it up a little and had some serious debate about it.
So based on a few vague comments, I managed to track down what the issue is since neither this nor the previous/. article nor the sites opposed to it (who seem to want to portray it as a Big Evil Government conspiracy to take away your freedom) delve into it.
Several airports use Terminal Doppler Weather Radar for high-resolution maps of storms, rainfall, and most importantly (for airports) microbursts. TDWR operates at frequencies from 5.60 - 5.64 GHz. That's smack dab in the middle of the 5 GHz band used by 802.11a, n, and ac. You'll notice use of those specific frequencies (channels 120, 124, 128) are prohibited in the U.S. and Canada for this reason.
Based on that, it sounds like the issue is that you can buy a 5 GHz device off the shelf, then hack the firmware to re-enable those frequencies. And the FCC is proposing this action because people have been doing exactly that and the FCC has received reports from the airports of such interference on those frequencies.
Take the electricity generated in any year and multiply it by 1000 to convert go MWh, divide it by the average of the installed capacity for that year and the previous year (to account for build-out during the year)
Whoops, also multiply the denominator by 8766 hours/yr. So for 2014:
Even more interns of percentage gains, solar's capacity factor has risen from 16 to 20% in that same time frame.
Those figures are extremely suspect. Capacity factor for solar is mostly dependent on your latitude and the weather. The only way to increase it manually is by building more solar generation which tracks the sun instead of sits at a fixed angle. Which has higher construction costs and requires more maintenance. (i.e. You get more Watt-hours per Watt of installed capacity, but fewer Watts per $ spent on construction and maintenance. It's typically only done on thermal solar installations where you're using mirrors to shine sunlight at a heating element, so you have to track the sun anyway.)
Capacity factor for fixed solar installations in the continental U.S. averages about 0.145. In the desert southwest it peaks at about 0.185.
Germany has been averaging about 0.11. Take the electricity generated in any year and multiply it by 1000 to convert go MWh, divide it by the average of the installed capacity for that year and the previous year (to account for build-out during the year), and you'll mostly get numbers around 0.11.
The UK is even worse due to its higher latitude, it's average capacity factor for solar is about 0.097.
The cost of wind in the U.S. (about $0.14-$0.19 / kWh last I checked)
I should clarify that that's retail pricing. Wholesale (production) pricing figures I've seen for wind put it at about $0.07-$0.11 / kWh. Slightly higher than natural gas and nuclear but falling rapidly. Coal is around $0.05, hydro the cheapest at $0.02-$0.04.
Speaking of renewables in the U.S. why is hydro never mentioned when discussing renewables?!?
Hydro capacity is closed to maxed out - building new dams is controversial because the remaining potential locations are mostly ecologically sensitive. And you can't run hydro longer if you need more power. The amount of water behind the dam determines the sum total of power you can generate from it.
The big difference between the U.S. and Germany/UK with respect to this report is that average electricity prices in the U.S. is about $0.12/kWh. In the UK it's about $0.22/kWh. And Germany is about $0.32/kWh. The cost of wind in the U.S. (about $0.14-$0.19 / kWh last I checked) has been cheaper than the cost of typical electricity sources in the UK and Germany for many years now. The U.S. just uses more fossil fuels (and has lower electricity prices) because it has massive domestic coal and gas reserves, whereas the UK and Germany have to import most of their fossil fuels (or in the case of Germany, buy their electricity from neighboring countries).
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I'll add that spreading baseless conclusions like TFA that a company (Google in this case) is in fact selling off your email address can turn good companies bad. If Google is not selling your email address to spammers, but after enough negative publicity everyone thinks they are, they might just decide what the hell. People are blaming us for selling out anyway, so why don't we just sell out for real and at least make some money off it since we're taking the blame either way.
If you're going to publish conclusions, back it up with evidence. Otherwise you're just purveying rumor and gossip. I have two email addresses hosted by Gmail (I got my personal domain in on Google Apps for Business when it was free), and have never received any spam at them related to my web browsing. Furthermore, I own my own domain and create an email alias specific to each company when I sign up for their services (company_name@mydomain.com). I have never received any spam at google@mydomain.com.
I've been trying to figure out if this patent covers something ARM implemented, or something Apple added when they modified the ARM A7 and A8 processor designs for their own devices. That is, did UWM sue Apple as a proxy and a prelude to suing every other company out there using an ARM processor? Which would be a huge deal. Or does the reach of this patent end here (other than eliminating predictive branch ordering from future processors until the patent expires)? Which is not very newsworthy except for Apple.
Unfortunately all the news articles I've found on it so far are written at the level of a jury of non-technical people, and provide no information which could answer this really important question. Maybe someone here has come across a better article?
Firewire flopped because Apple charged $1 per port to anyone else wishing to implement it. USB was free. Which brings this discussion back full circle to whether patents are helping or stifling technological progress.
Agree with everything you said except this part. They're not a hardware innovator. If you've opened up Macbooks to repair them, you'll find the same commodity parts used by every other laptop manufacturer. Heck, they're not even made by Apple, they're made by Quanta, an ODM (original design manufacturer - like an OEM except they also design the product). You wouldn't believe the number of people I've had to argue with about that; they seem to think Macbooks contain Apple-brand fairy dust and unicorn horn powder inside It's like telling a kid Santa doesn't exist when I tell them the CPU is by Intel, the awesome-performing SSD is by hated Samsung, the memory by Micron, the screen by LG, etc. Those are the companies doing the true hardware innovation; Apple is just buying and reselling their products.
But the one area Apple is really good at and really does innovate in is software. The iPod for example was successful mostly because of its tight integration with iTunes. Before that, it was a PITA to convert the music files on your computer into playlists on your MP3 player. Most involved connecting your MP3 player to your computer and dragging and dropping the individual MP3s, converting playlist files, automatic sorting via artist names stored in the MP3 (or not stored if you ripped it yourself), alphabetical sorting which sometimes got messed up depending on upper and lower case names, songs which disappeared because they were buried in the folder structure, etc. Before iTunes became a bloated mess, Apple nailed how synchronization of your music collection across devices should work. Likewise, Time Machine is the best UI I've seen on a backup program. The Macbooks are considered to have the best trackpads not because they're physically better but because they have the best software. The software augments the usability of the hardware enough to catapult the hardware into success.
To add to your list, here's pinch to zoom in 1988
There should have been no occasion to hit two security employees and a company ATV because the reporters shouldn't have been on the property in the first place. Regardless of how the situation escalated, the incident was ultimately precipitated by the reporters trespassing.
The original infraction was trespassing. The obvious resolution for trespassing is to get the trespasser off the property. Charging them with criminal trespass is secondary. So whether the security guards had authority to stop someone from leaving the property was irrelevant - their primary goal should've been to get the reporters to leave. Which they were apparently trying to do at the time the injuries were sustained, when the guards tried to stop them.
If the security cameras in place were insufficient to grab a license plate and photos of the trespassers' faces, then that should've been something for the security guards to bring up at the next manager's meeting so it could be addressed in the future. We're not talking about thieves making off with the crown jewels, we're talking about a couple guys being where they're not supposed to be (at the time of the incident the security guards probably had no way to know these were reporters - anyone can print out an official-looking ID). There was no need for heroics on the part of the security guards. Chasing the reporters out should have been sufficient this time, with the incident providing ammo for the guards' request for better cameras and (perhaps) a gate at the entrance.
I've managed a 50 acre resort and have had to deal with trespassers (mostly high school kids from the neighborhood sneaking into the pool). The vast majority of them leave when asked. There is no reason to escalate the situation unless they refuse to leave or start destroying property. Unless they are causing or have caused physical damage, I really don't understand why you would want to stop them from leaving. Even if they cuss at you and flip you off, there's no reason to escalate things - being a jerk is not a crime.
This is purely a cost-benefit analysis, and what's true for you will not be true for others.
If you purchase the car new for $30,000 (smart people don't, but we're talking the typical car buyer here), use it for 5 years, and sell it for $15,000, it depreciates an average of $3000/yr.
The average car in the U.S. is driven 12,000 miles/yr. Gas for 12,000 miles/yr, at 25 MPG and $3/gal, works out to $1440/yr
Maintenance and insurance is around $2500/yr (mine and maybe yours is a lot less, but we're talking the typical, median driver here with an accident or two on his record).
Total cost of ownership is then $6940yr, or $0.578/mi, which is almost exactly the IRS reimbursement figure of $0.575/mi so we're on pretty solid footing here. If you use the car on 300 days out of the year, that's $23.13/day.
Can you do everything you usually do in a typical day of driving the car for $23.13? If you live in a city with good public transportation, the answer is probably yes (ignoring the cost of time you have to wait for said public transportation). If you have to rely on taxis, the answer is probably no. And if you live outside the city the answer is almost certainly no.
There's also the tragedy of the commons to worry about. I just got back from taking my dog for a walk at the beach, and there's wet sand all over the back seat. Do you really want to get the autonomous car right after I've used it to ferry my dog around? In a taxi, the driver's presence discourages you from abusing the shared asset. You won't get that with an autonomous car unless the car service puts cameras inside them that are always recording. Which would could as a huge negative for a lot of people in the buy vs rent a car argument.
Because people are irrational. We fear exotic deaths more than we do mundane deaths. Travel by airliner is much safer than travel by car, yet every time there's a plane crash we have a huge investigation for the purpose of figuring out what went wrong so we can prevent it from happening again. But tens of thousands of people die in car accidents, and all they get is a brief police report stating it was an accident without really delving into the cause. Why? Because death by airplane crash is more exotic than death by car crash. The same thing plagues nuclear power. Death by radiation is exotic, death by falling or getting lung cancer from soot inhalation is not. So we scrutinize and heavily regulate everything to do with nuclear power when it's already the safest power source we've ever invented in deaths per MWh of power generated, while turning a blind eye to deaths by coal (pollution), wind, and solar (primarily falls during maintenance - their diffuse nature means there's a lot more maintenance to do).
You double down on this if the accident was in your control vs out of your control. If you could've done something to prevent the accident (was driving a car) but failed to so, you say "Oopsie, I won't make that mistake again. No give me my keys back." If someone else could've done something to prevent the accident (driving a bus or piloting a plane) but failed to do so, you sue the bastard for everything he's got and try to get him banned so he never drives/flies again.
The combination of these two means autonomous cars have to become a helluva lot better than human drivers before they'll be accepted. Dying because of a typo in a line of code counts as really exotic, and the press will have a field day with it the first time it happens. And the makers of the autonomous cars will need huge insurance policies to deal with the extra liability they'll incur, since it'll likely be bigger than the sum total of all private auto liability insurance policies today (a few percent of the purchase price of the vehicle every year it's in operation).
We know an economy with money works. The burden of proof is on the person advocating the hypothesis that an economy without money can work, to provide evidence in support of his hypothesis, not for the person arguing against it to disprove it. Or put another way, if you can provide an example of just one functioning money-less economy, you've proven your hypothesis. Rattling off a list of a million different things which don't affect whether an economy works, money or no money, doesn't prove a thing.
The main reason I can see it not working is because money isn't some "entrenchment of the economic elite." At a fundamental level, money is a representation of productivity. Maybe not a 1.0 correlation, but still correlated. Money is basically what you get in exchange for doing or making something society feels is productive. Which you can then exchange for things other people do or make that you feel is productive. Consequently, when supply does not match demand, the best way to sort who gets some of that limited supply is money - the most productive people. The entire rational for making theft, fraud, and scams illegal is because they deprive others of the fruits of their productivity without providing productivity of their own.
Why not use a bartering system instead? Because money offers more liquidity. If you''ve got eggs to sell, and you need milk, the easiest way to barter it is to find someone selling milk who wants eggs. If you can't find that, you need to find someone selling milk who wants x, then find someone selling x who wants eggs, and work out a 3-way trade. Beyond that the barters start to get more and more complicated, and there's an increased chance the time you spend putting together the barter costs you more than what you're trying to buy.
Money neatly solves this problem by making all barters universal. You exchange the eggs for money, then you can exchange the money for milk. It adds liquidity to the trading system (at the cost of having to maintain the money so its value is stable enough that people aren't afraid to use it as an intermediary instead of doing a straight barter).
That's the catch. There is no common consensus about the value of things. There's an average consensus, but not a common consensus. Some people value certain things more than others. When different people value things differently, you need to be able to somehow amalgamate their preferences. The way to do this which gives the most individual freedom (i.e. the method which least requires the person who doesn't value the item to have to contribute to paying for it) is to give each individual their own "money" and put them entirely in control of their own purchases. That's the basis of the free market. (This model breaks down when consequences of that purchase are borne by society, rather than the purchasing individual. e.g. Pollution. More generally classified as tragedy of the commons, or prisoner's dilemma situations. Which is why most successful economies are a mixture of free market and socialist ideals.)
I always figured the "economy" in Star Trek worked because they had access to nearly limitless power (warp cores), and devices which could convert that energy into any form of matter (replicators). Once you get those two, personal productivity becomes moot. You could do manual labor 24 hours/day and it wouldn't generate as much productivity as a fraction of a percent of the output of a warp core. Thus it's just less of a hassle to give everyone what they want and not require them to do productive work. (Items of limited supply aren't really addressed by the show, like how do they decide who gets to live in the prime waterfront apartment in San Francisco?)
Actually, that's a problem too. I manage a small commercial building, and I noticed the electric bill spike one month. Some investigation and it turned out one of the tenants had bought an electric car, and was charging it while he was at work by using an extension cord to plug the car into an outdoor power outlet near the parking lot. That outlet happened to be hooked up to the building's electric meter.
Yup, it's fucked up so badly that it kills fewer people per MWh generated than any other power source, including solar, wind, and hydro. Shame on us for creating the safest form of power generation in the history of mankind.
You can't compare to a vacuum. You can't look at fatalities or injuries caused by a nuclear accident, compare to some hypothetical universe where that nuclear power plant (and only that nuclear power plant) didn't exist, and criticize nuclear power for killing those people. A valid comparison must use opportunity cost. Everything has some danger, some risk of death.. If the nuclear plant hadn't been there, some other type of plant would've had to be there to generate the same amount of electricity. That's the alternative case you have to compare against, not a vacuum. How many deaths would that alternate power plant have caused?
When you crunch the statistics that way, you find that had the nuclear plant been replaced by any other type of power plant, statistically you would've killed more people. Even wind, solar, and hydro are more dangerous. Or put in relative terms, replacing coal, gas, hydro, wind, and solar plants with nuclear plants saves lives.
Basically, political lobbying has forced us into a type of testing which can be conducted by a trained monkey in 10-20 minutes. It's hard to make a realistic test which meets those requirements. Cut and paste from my last post on this topic:
Pulling each car off the road and testing it only makes sense when a large number of cars are not in compliance or in borderline compliance (i.e. might drift out of compliance before the next test). If a test costs $40 and 90% of cars are in compliance with emissions standards, you're paying $400 to detect each car out of compliance. And the test is worth it.
Now what happens when 99.9% of cars are in compliance? You're now paying $40,000 to detect each car out of compliance. At that point (actually long before it) the testing isn't cost-effective anymore. California reached this threshold where the testing was no longer worth it in the early 1990s. Most cars were in compliance, and most of the air pollution was caused by about 1 in 1000 cars (mostly older models) which were spewing out hundreds or thousands of times more emissions than a compliant car.
The companies which make the emissions testing equipment suggested a much more elegant and cost-effective solution. Stop testing each car every year. Put the emissions measuring equipment at various chokepoints on the road like free off-ramps. The equipment would then sniff the air as each car drove by, and when it detected an excessive amount of emissions it would snap a picture of the violating car's license plate. If a certain set of plates was flagged by multiple measuring stations, the State could then send the owner of that car a letter requiring its emissions be tested.
Sounds great! It would've caught the cheating VW cars immediately. So why didn't it happen? The emissions testing itself had become a billion dollar industry. The gas stations and auto mechanics lobbied heavily to keep the mandatory testing in place. For them, a billion dollars a year were on the line. The companies making the detection equipment only stood to make a few tens or hundreds of millions of dollars one time by selling it to the state. You can guess which side won. So we ended up with testing which wastes money and isn't as effective at detecting cheating as other solutions.
Diesels already almost always run in their optimum range. A car engine basically has three operating states that are important. Accelerating from a stop, cruising (usually at highway speeds), and accelerating at highway speeds (to pass).
Gasoline engines hit peak power and torque at the high-end of their RPM range. That's great for accelerating at highway speeds, not so good for cruising and accelerating from a stop. Because most of the engine's time is spent cruising, that's where you need to optimize fuel burn rate to improve overall fuel efficiency. Gas engines have a lot of problem with this because it's not coincident with their peak power and torque production. Consequently you're having to optimize the engine's performance at two hugely different RPMs. The hybrid helps a lot here because the electric motor provides a lot of torque at 0 RPM for accelerating from a stop (power = torque * RPM * a constant),and allows the gas engine to be shut off completely for a while during cruising. So now you can optimize the gas engine for high-RPM efficiency, and rely on the electric motor for what would normally be low-RPM operation.
Diesel engines have a higher compression ratio so hit peak power and torque at the low-end of their RPM range. That's great for cruising and accelerating from a stop, not so great for accelerating at highway speeds. This is why they're so common in tractor trailers - it's OK if the truck takes a long time to accelerate at highway speeds, but you want good power and fuel efficiency during cruise. Since the diesel engine's peak torque and power happen close to cruise, they're a lot easier to optimize for fuel efficiency.
A hybrid won't actually help much here because it doesn't add much - the diesel engine already has lots of torque close to 0 RPM, and is fuel efficient during cruise. About the only thing a hybrid would add would be regenerative braking. While that's a big deal in city driving, the vast majority of the driving tractor trailers do is on the highway, so again there's little benefit from the hybrid. The best thing to add to a diesel is actually a turbo. Their weakness is power output at higher RPMs, and a turbo provides extra power at the high-end of the RPM range, which improves accelerating to pass at highway speeds - precisely the driving stage diesels normally have problems with.
If you compare the power of a diesel-electric locomotive to the weight it's pulling, it's like putting a 5 hp engine on a SUV. If you're ok with having that little power and taking several minutes to get up to full speeds, then yeah a diesel-electric motor makes more sense than putting in a 50-gear transmission. Realistic driving conditions require the truck engine be a lot more powerful, meaning fewer gears needed to accelerate from 0 to highway speeds. And it's cheaper, less complex, and more efficient just to send the power straight to the wheels rather than going with a diesel-electric system.
Which phone? I've got a Nexus 5 on pure Lollipop and it doesn't exhibit that behavior. Pressing the Home button sends you back to your home screen, or locks the device (from the lock screen - I have Smart Lock enabled). Long-pressing it does nothing. Swiping the home button up takes me to the Google Now screen. I think you're dealing with a modification to Android made by a phone manufacturer or carrier.
No, clearly the engine is capable of passing the EPA emissions tests without the urea injection. Otherwise it would've never been approved for sale in the U.S. So the lack of a urea injection system does not prevent the engine from meeting the emissions standards. It merely lowers the engine output you can achieve while complying with emissions standards.
In other words, you could achieve this with a simple software kludge. Not that I believe it was just a couple of rogue software engineers who decided to do this. There's no incentive for a lowly software engineer to do this. Someone higher up had to have directed them to do it.
It's a huge problem in the used market. Or as in this case when both versions are being sold new simultaneously (another example is when the same laptop ships with screens from two different manufacturers with one screen being visibly superior). I mean the whole rationale for Apple's simplified product line is that you only have to consider 2 or 3 models and pick the one you want. That gets thrown out the window if there are significant differences within a model.
I don't really blame Apple in this case, since theoretically the two products should perform nearly identically, and they must've run tests to confirm that prior to receiving batch shipments. I do blame them on their laptops, where it's extremely difficult to tell a 2013 Macbook apart from a 2014 Macbook (you have to enter the serial number into a website). Most of the theory around free markets is predicated on the assumption that the buyers are informed. Withholding information from customers in the name of "simplicity" is a good way to break the market.
The problem with economics isn't the math or the scientific method. The problem is, at its lowest level what happens in economics is based entirely on how all the individual participants in the economy think and act. That is, if your economy were based on a population of deterministic robots whose "decisions" could be predictably be quantified and modeled, then economics would probably by the purest science right after math.
But because the economic actors are humans, many of them with wildly unpredictable and irrational approaches to buying and selling, and prone to media hype and mass terror, economics ends up becoming one of the least-predictable sciences. Even if I can correctly predict with precise accuracy what the price of gold should be, its actual price will be different because it's skewed by people out there who are convinced gold is the only safe investment, or who are convinced gold is garbage.
Actually, given how invasive Win 10 is, I'm inclined to believe Microsoft knows exactly how many systems are actively running it for daily use. In fact, I'd say that's a statistic they're tracking internally day-to-day since they seem to be staking a lot on their ability to monitor how you're using the OS.
If you do a lot of traveling, restaurants in most of the world operate exactly that way. You don't exactly see massive reports of food poisoning sickening or killing huge numbers of people who visit such restaurants.
I'm not saying such regulation isn't helpful. I'm only saying that you shouldn't assume that such regulation is always helpful. Over-regulation comes at a cost. The county health inspector assigned to the hotel/restaurant I used to work at was a control freak on a power trip. She wrote us up for several "violations" that she required us to fix or she'd shut us down. Some of them were reasonable (mice had chewed a hole in an exterior door). Others were just plain ridiculous. She required us to install metal flashing around the top of our walk-in refrigerators to enclose the air gap between it and the ceiling, which we did at a cost of several thousand dollars. During our next fire inspection, the fire marshal told us that was a fire code violation and we had to take it down - that space is open specifically so you can immediately see and smell any smoke from a fire that develops in the refrigeration unit. She required us to put sneeze guards on the sides of salad serving carts which abutted against each other (so the sides weren't exposed). We spent weeks trying to a place that sold these, then finally called the manufacturer. They told us that they sold these carts nationwide in thousands of health jurisdictions, and this was the first time anyone had ever inquired about putting sneeze guards on the side. We ended up buying plexiglas sheets and having our maintenance department custom-cut them to fit in the sides of said carts to make our inspector happy.
Personally I'm on the anti-Uber side of this. I do think regulation of the taxi industry serves a beneficial purpose. However, I support Uber in challenging the status quo. That is, I refuse to condemn Uber "just because" they are upsetting the existing taxicab business and regulation model. Said model has developed slowly over a hundred years. It's probably high time we shook it up a little and had some serious debate about it.
So based on a few vague comments, I managed to track down what the issue is since neither this nor the previous /. article nor the sites opposed to it (who seem to want to portray it as a Big Evil Government conspiracy to take away your freedom) delve into it.
Several airports use Terminal Doppler Weather Radar for high-resolution maps of storms, rainfall, and most importantly (for airports) microbursts. TDWR operates at frequencies from 5.60 - 5.64 GHz. That's smack dab in the middle of the 5 GHz band used by 802.11a, n, and ac. You'll notice use of those specific frequencies (channels 120, 124, 128) are prohibited in the U.S. and Canada for this reason.
Based on that, it sounds like the issue is that you can buy a 5 GHz device off the shelf, then hack the firmware to re-enable those frequencies. And the FCC is proposing this action because people have been doing exactly that and the FCC has received reports from the airports of such interference on those frequencies.
Not sure who told you that. I suggest not believing anything they tell you again. Levilized cost of UK electricity generation sources, 2013, 10% discount rate, from cheapest to most expensive:
(in Pounds per MWh)
80 = combined cycle gas turbine
90 = nuclear
101 = onshore wind
108 = biomass conversion (usually means methane recapture from landfills)
113 = offshore wind R2
120 = offshore wind R3
158 = large-scale PV solar
181 = open cycle gas turbine
Estimated levilized cost for projects starting in 2019, 10% discount rate (in Pounds per MWh):
80 = nuclear
85 = combined cycle gas turbine
95 = gas CCGT post combustion carbon capture
99 = onshore wind
107 = offshore wind R2
107 = coal with oxy combustion carbon capture
114 = offshore wind R3
123 = large-scale PV solar
134 = coal gasification with carbon capture
190 = open cycle gas turbine
Whoops, also multiply the denominator by 8766 hours/yr. So for 2014:
34930 GWh = 34930000 MWh
2014 capacity = 38236 MW
2013 capacity = 36377 MW
Average 2013-2014 capacity = 37287.5 MW
(38930000 MWh per year) / (37287.5 MW * 8766 hours per year) = 0.107 capacity factor
Those figures are extremely suspect. Capacity factor for solar is mostly dependent on your latitude and the weather. The only way to increase it manually is by building more solar generation which tracks the sun instead of sits at a fixed angle. Which has higher construction costs and requires more maintenance. (i.e. You get more Watt-hours per Watt of installed capacity, but fewer Watts per $ spent on construction and maintenance. It's typically only done on thermal solar installations where you're using mirrors to shine sunlight at a heating element, so you have to track the sun anyway.)
Capacity factor for fixed solar installations in the continental U.S. averages about 0.145. In the desert southwest it peaks at about 0.185.
Germany has been averaging about 0.11. Take the electricity generated in any year and multiply it by 1000 to convert go MWh, divide it by the average of the installed capacity for that year and the previous year (to account for build-out during the year), and you'll mostly get numbers around 0.11.
The UK is even worse due to its higher latitude, it's average capacity factor for solar is about 0.097.
I should clarify that that's retail pricing. Wholesale (production) pricing figures I've seen for wind put it at about $0.07-$0.11 / kWh. Slightly higher than natural gas and nuclear but falling rapidly. Coal is around $0.05, hydro the cheapest at $0.02-$0.04.
Hydro capacity is closed to maxed out - building new dams is controversial because the remaining potential locations are mostly ecologically sensitive. And you can't run hydro longer if you need more power. The amount of water behind the dam determines the sum total of power you can generate from it.
The big difference between the U.S. and Germany/UK with respect to this report is that average electricity prices in the U.S. is about $0.12/kWh. In the UK it's about $0.22/kWh. And Germany is about $0.32/kWh. The cost of wind in the U.S. (about $0.14-$0.19 / kWh last I checked) has been cheaper than the cost of typical electricity sources in the UK and Germany for many years now. The U.S. just uses more fossil fuels (and has lower electricity prices) because it has massive domestic coal and gas reserves, whereas the UK and Germany have to import most of their fossil fuels (or in the case of Germany, buy their electricity from neighboring countries).