Intel's Atom processors typically retail for $30-$80, with some being more, some less. OEM pricing is lower. That's just the CPU so it's not directly comparable to ARM-based SoCs which I hear cost about $15-$25. So Intel is substantially higher priced, but not ruinously so from an end-user's purchase standpoint. Certainly not $650.
The more interesting thing to watch will be how this impacts the broader computing market. Intel has managed to stay ahead of the competition buoyed by the enormous profits it generates from its Core CPUs, which typically sell for $100-$400. As CPUs get faster, the general population can get by with something lower down the product chain. I've already been recommending i3s to most of my customers for the last couple years. I'm very close to dropping the bar to high-end Atom or AMD CPUs. As more and more of Intel's sales shift towards these lower-end CPUs, their overall profit margin will start to dry up. It's going to be interesting to watch how they'll react to that.
Great east coast blackout: Cell coverage was non-existent. POTS worked fine
POTS works during power failures because the phone line itself carries enough power to operate a low-tech phone. Outside of hotels, I haven't seen one of these in over a decade. Every home phone I've seen is cordless and needs AC power. If you've got a battery backup, you can move it from the computer over to the landline phone to use it. But battery backups in homes are almost as rare as low-tech corded phones.
Cell phones will work for about an hour at least, until the batteries in the towers give out. That should cover 99.99% of blackouts. My cell phone has always worked during a blackout. In the one extended blackout I went through (3 days because fallen trees took out all the power and phone lines), if I went outside to a high spot my cell phone could pick up a distant powered tower, and I could make calls (note that only CDMA can do this; GSM has a range limit of about 20 miles due to being sensitive to lag caused by the speed of light).
Earthquake couple years ago (it was a 6 which is huge for this area): Cell coverage was crap since every body was calling everybody else. POTS... was fine
In the old days, POTS would become useless immediately after a large earthquake. The shaking would knock all the vertically mounted pay phone handsets off the hook. Same for some home phones (the kind with a separate base and handset). These phones would tie up a POTS line even though nobody was calling. If you tried to make a call then, you'd get a fast busy signal (all circuits busy). You had to wait a few minutes for the phone company to time all those lines out and forcibly disconnect them. By which time everyone else was trying to call and it could take an hour before you could finally get a dial tone. TV news would constantly broadcast to resist the urge to call relatives to tell them you're ok and please stay off the phones, so emergency services and those calling 911 could get through first.
So it's not that POTS stands up better in earthquakes. It's that much fewer people use it nowadays, while the infrastructure that still remains was originally designed to handle a much larger volume of calls. As that equipment starts to break down and isn't replaced because the call volume isn't needed, POTS service will become as (un)reliable as cell phone service after these types of widescale disasters.
In this case, it's simple: they hired someone to write the package several years ago, and wanted to re-sell the same package again and again. They didn't want to pay to update the software. So, they lost a lot of business. Assuming they're not bankrupt now, I hope they learned an important lesson.:)
That's partly OP's point.
With private businesses, you have to accommodate the customer or you go out of business.
With public services, your customers have to accommodate you or they won't get the service you're providing.
In the 1980s, I was considered dorky for telling all my friends about this Internet thing, and how they should all check with their school to see if they could get an email address. By 2000, if you didn't have an email address, you were behind the times and a technological outcast.
Whether or not something is dorky is almost completely based on how fashionable it is. Speaking objectively, neckties are dorky. They serve absolutely no purpose, are an impediment to many activities, yet are required to fit in with many professions. Why? Because "everyone else wears them." That's really what it boils down to. If only nerds use Glass, then it will be considered dorky (like pocket protectors). If all the cool kids start to use it, then it will be considered fashionable. All you have to do is look at old movies and yearbooks to see how capricious this determination can be. The list of things which were considered fashionable at the time but we now consider silly include beehive hairstyles, horn-rimmed glasses, tail fins on cars, flower-print fonts, disco suits, tight shorts on guys, hot colors, etc. You can see even more if you go back to clothing styles from previous centuries. There's a lot of stuff which becomes mainstream not because it's useful or sensible, but merely because "everyone else wears it."
Samsung is already working ona solutionto that. Basically, instead of your employer having full run of the phone, all the employer stuff is put into a sandboxed instance of the OS. Your personal phone runs into another sandboxed instance. Like having two virtual machines running simultaneously, you can flip between the two. Your employer has full control over one, and you have full control over the other.
I'm a little skeptical of how well it'll work in practice (backups will probably be problematic). But if they can pull it off, it will eliminate the need to carry two phones just because your workplace wants full access and control.
Wind power energy cost is at grid parity right now, and is virtually CO2 neutral.
I mean, yeah sure, wind is intermittent; but it doesn't melt down, and storage can be done with hydro, pumped hydro or electric cars, or you can fill in with a bit of fossil or biofuel when the wind doesn't blow.
Pumped hydro is about 70%-80% efficient. So wind would have to be about 0.7-0.8x grid parity for stored wind energy to be economically viable. Charging losses for an EV are about 25%. So if you also factor in losses converting the EV's DC back into AC for transmission on the grid, it's going to be worse than 70% overall.
Also, yeah wind doesn't melt down. But it killed more people in 2011 than nuclear, despite providing only about 1/10th the power. The difference is that those deaths caused by wind weren't splashed all over the TV for weeks on end. It's not that wind is inherently safer. Don't get me wrong, after hydro, wind is the most viable of the renewables and I fully support its build-out. But a lot of people are basing their support on incomplete or inaccurate information, colored by what stories make jucier headlines on the evening news.
"But the drop in US demand for coal sparked a drop in the price of coal, which in turn sparked a shift in Europe where coal replaced much of the more expensive gas to supply power stations."
While unfortunate, I don't think that really matters in the bigger picture. If the price of coal dropped in Europe despite the availability of U.S. coal, that implies demand is down relative to supply, meaning the total coal used by the U.S. and Europe combined is still down. If consumption were up, coal prices would likewise be up, and Europe would have shifted back to natural gas.
I think this quote from the paper is more relevant to the specific issue of reducing coal consumption:
"The extent to which fast-growing economies depend on coal is substantial. China and India accounted for almost 95% of global coal demand growth between 2000 and 2011."
Simple solution. Set some rate, say a 5% surcharge, which covers all copyright infringement. The copyright holders are then free to negotiate/litigate among themselves on how to divide up that 3%.
If we can't get them to stop bothering us, maybe the best thing to do is to get them fighting each other so they're too busy to bother the rest of us.
Probably something to do with sovereign immunity. Like how the U.S. government extended immunity to the telecos for participating in warrantless wiretapping.
The problem with using cost as a major argument against renewable energy sources is that the price of gas has skyrocketed in the last decade. The price this year is close to three times what it was when I started driving (about 12 years ago, bigger difference for older folks I'm sure)
It hasn't "skyrocketed". You need to take into account inflation. My family moved to the U.S. in early 1973 (prior to the Arab oil embargo). Gas then was $0.35 per gallon.
Put $0.35 and 1973 into this handy-dandy inflation calculator and you get $1.83. So after you subtract out inflation, the price of gas has increased by about 2x in 40 years. That's hardly "skyrocketing."
This is in contrast to renewable energy which, while still far more expensive than fossil fuels, are decreasing in price.
While I generally agree, you have to be careful to take into account current interest rates. Renewables are notorious for front-loading their costs. Solar isn't the most expensive form of electricity generation because it costs a lot to maintain and operate PV panels. It's the most expensive because PV panels cost a lot to manufacture and buy, and you have to amortize that up-front cost over the lifetime of the panels.
Right now, interest rates have been at a historical low for over 5 years. This means that amortizing up-front costs is really cheap. If you pay $100 up-front and amortize it over 10 years at 4%, you're paying a total of $148. OTOH if we take interest rates from the early 1980s when it peaked at just over 20%, the same $100 over 10 years would cost you $619. So the current fiscal environment has been very friendly to renewables (and nuclear for that matter). But once we get out of the current economic downturn and interest rates start to creep up again, I expect renewables to become more expensive.
(Then you have to subtract out the effect of inflation from the compounded interest. But in general interest rates are slightly higher than inflation, so the above still holds true. It's just not quite as extreme as the raw numbers might suggest.)
I don't believe we can magically switch tomorrow, I do believe we need to start taking a switch seriously now though and begin what will be a long, slow transition period. It's going to cost more in the short term, but it'll be cheaper long term.
I don't have a problem with funding research and development into improving renewables technology. As you say, it's a prudent investment in the future, and will let us switch energy sourcees quickly when the time arrives.
I do have a problem with offering cash incentives for consumers to adopt technologies which are currently not cost-effective. That's a net drain on our economy, and hampers our ability to divert additional money to research overall. It'd be like if the government of Japan had offered its citizens big incentives to buy analog HDTVs in the 1980s. That could have cost their economy tens of billions of dollars for technology which became obsolete when digital HDTV became feasible in the 1990s. Since Japan wisely limited their investment to funding for HDTV research, all they lost in that transition was the few billion they'd invested in analog HDTV R&D.
(I'll add a caveat that there is justification for cash incentives with technologies which actually are cost-effective long-term, but whose high up-front costs discourage adoption. In general, people are notoriously bad at saving money for a down payment. So if a technology with a high up-front cost reduces lifetime costs overall, then a purchase incentive program is warranted. Buyback programs to dispose of old, inefficient refrigerators and get people to replace them with new efficient ones are a good example.)
IMHO it's a bit of a misnomer to try to categorize all these devices according to their form - phone, tablet, notebook, desktop, etc. They're all PCs (personal computers, not IBM compatible PCs), and as such all of them can pretty much perform the same functions. We've already passed the point where the input devices need not be integrated into the PC - you can connect any old bluetooth versions wirelessly. And we rapidly approaching the point where you can decouple the display as well (Intel's WiDi, though not widely used, shows it's technically feasible).
If you've taken apart a phone or tablet, or even a notebook, you know that the "computer" part of it only occupies a small circuit board. This part is going to continue to get smaller (e.g. Raspberry Pi and MK808). My prediction is in the future, your phone or maybe even your watch will contain the CPU, RAM, and storage. A "tablet" will just be a 7"-12" screen and digitizer which connects wirelessly with your phone. A "laptop" will just be the "tablet" plus a wireless keyboard and mouse.
If you look at who controlled both branches of Congress during those same years (you know, the branch which actually makes the laws and budgets), you'd come to pretty much the opposite conclusion. But everyone is so eager to slice and dice the data until they find a pattern which fits their preconceived conclusions, then espouse that singular slice as if it explains everything.
People like simple answers because they don't like having to think so hard about things. Now think about that. The main conclusion I've reached after watching 30 years of politics is that exhibiting high certainty on a complex political issue is negatively correlated to how much one has tried to actually understand the issue. The very fact that we're even debating this, instead of the world having been taken over by those who practice one or the other oh-so-obviously superior ideology, is a pretty strong indication that the influence of these political choices on events is actually pretty small.
I own some guns for sporting purposes, and a couple of big clunky rifles for hunting. A false negative or a laggy response time on those isn't necessarily a big deal. OTOH my wife and I also have guns for self defense and home defense. A false negative or laggy response time on those could get us killed.
It looks like you're trying to fire your gun.
Would you like help?
- Shooting inanimate targets for practice.
- Hunting deer or other wild game.
- Driving off assailants and criminals.
- I am a law enforcement officer trying to stop a dangerous suspect.
- Testing my gun's functionality after maintenance.
- Firing bullets randomly into the air (i.e. celebratory gunfire)
- Combating a foreign invasion or insurgent rebellion.
- Just fire the damn gun.
I believe that should be part of ANY copyright law. In order for copyright to be maintained. A work of art must be available for sale within a 5 year period. Stop selling it, and you lose your copyright.
No you don't want that. If that's how the law worked, every open source project would lose their copyrights after 5 years, and the GPL, BSD license, etc. would become pretty useless. Likewise, if you and your wife videotaped yourselves having sex 6 years ago, and someone repairing your home found it and copied it, they'd be free to release it to the public with no repercussions because it was public domain.
Copyright is for controlling distribution of a work you've created. Not necessarily making money off of it.
Why do we have to serve an obsolete, feudal economic theory that postulates only people with jobs can have money? A better solution is to use economics as a tool to serve us instead of the other way around: guarantee each individual a basic income.
Money isn't some abstract thing we can create at will. Money is a representation of productivity. No matter how we try to manipulate it, its value will tend towards a steady state which equates its availability with productivity. If you're not producing something or helping improve someone else's productivity, you're not contributing to the economy, and thus you don't get any money.
If you try to guarantee each individual a basic income, what happens depends on how the individuals react. If the individuals on average don't change their behavior and continue working as before, then nothing changes. OTOH if some individuals realize they'll be paid regardless and so stop working, then average productivity will decrease. Whereas the economy used to produce 100 widgets per year, it now produces 80. In this case, since you've fixed the income, the same amount of money is forced to circulate as before, so prices will rise. The economy used to produce 100 widgets and pay $100 in wages so each widget used to cost $1. But now the economy produces 80 widgets while still paying $100 in wages, so each widget now costs $1.25.
Back in the 1970s we were all promised that increased automation would lead to us all needing to do less work, and having increased leisure time. It all seemed like a rosy future at the time. The only problem seems to be that the owners of the robots don't want to share the benefits.
The problem is we listened to those who wanted to protect jobs in the 1970s and 1980s. We resisted the urge to automate in order to preserve menial assembly line jobs. That was great for the protecting the workers' jobs in the short term, but long-term it led to the outsourcing of not only their jobs to China in the late 1990s and 2000s, but the factories as well. So they lost their jobs anyway, and they also lost the opportunity to retrain to become a robot operator/repairman in their old factory. The factory owner got screwed too - he lost a ton of money or even went bankrupt when his factory closed. The companies which placed orders with the factories only benefit because they still own the product line. The end result is the same for them, it's just the manufacturing step which has changed locations.
All of us know the lesson here. We've had it pounded into our heads since childhood when we first heard the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. When given a choice between a better long-term outcome which has bad short-term consequences, or a better short-term outcome which has bad long-term consequences, it's almost always better to prioritize the long-term. Note that the industries which openly embraced automation and robots - e.g. the auto industry - still do most of their manufacturing in the U.S. It's mostly the factories which didn't automate or were difficult to automate - steel, textiles, electronics assembly - which have almost completely shifted overseas.
This is a problem I see over and over. People fail to properly take opportunity costs into account and deliberately stack the comparison to force it to produce the outcome they want. In the 1980s they would insist on comparing the labor situation (and nothing else) if robots replaced workers (fewer jobs), vs. if nothing else changed except robots didn't take their jobs (more jobs). They completely ignored the positives which came with automation (lowering of manufacturing costs leading to lower prices, and competitiveness with low-wage labor in developing countries), and the possible long-term negative consequences of their preferred choice never crossed their mind.
The owner of Foxconn gets it. He realizes wages are rising in China, and that China isn't going to remain the lowest-bid manufacturer of choice of the West for long if they persist using manual labor. So he's trying to automate his factories with robots as quickly as possible. He doesn't want Vietnam or Thailand to do to him what China did to us. Some of the workers in China are complaining about it now, but they'll be thanking him in 10-20 years when those manufacturing factories still exist to employ Chinese workers instead of everything having been moved to other countries.
Part of the problem with searching through a collapsed building is the risk of further collapses. Rescuers have been killed by subsequent collapses during an aftershock or when removing a chunk of debris caused remaining debris to shift and fall. And quite frequently the rescuers are forced to abandon a building because the engineers deem it too unstable to safely search when nobody knows if there's even anyone still alive inside.
With a robot you could search regardless of the safety risks, and concentrate rescue efforts which risk rescuers' lives only at locations where you know there's someone still alive.
It's a double-entendre. The Freedom is the lead ship in a new class of Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), designed to operate in shallow waters close to shore. It replaces the frigate (smaller than destroyers, typically used as escorts). The Navy tries to keep its main line ships away from shore, out of range of land-based radar and gun and missile batteries. The Freedom class ships are big enough to replace frigates in escort duty in open water, but have the freedom to operate closer to shore.
Previous ships which filled the near-shore role were much smaller (minesweepers and patrol boats) and typically needed frequent refueling to travel long distances. Hence the double-entendre in the name of the other class of LCS - the USS Independence.
So the overall efficiency can't be much higher than 0.1%. By comparison, solar cells are around 10% efficient, and LEDs 20%
The difference is that you pay to grow one plant, then it replicates on its own until you have millions of them. So you pay for the first plant, then the rest are essentially free. Solar cells and LED bulbs OTOH don't grow on trees - you're paying the same high fixed cost to manufacture each panel or bulb.
And if you think about it, what's hindering wide-scale PV and LED adoption right now? High up-front costs.
In absolute terms, there is about 100 watts/meter^2 of energy in sunlight.
The solar constant (energy flux of sunlight at Earth's orbit) is about 1360 W/m^2. A bit more than half of that reaches the earth's surface - about 750-800 W/m^2 (the rest being absorbed by the atmosphere). The 125 W/m^2 commonly quoted is the power output of widely-available 15% efficient PV panels under ideal condditions at the Earth's surface.
Libertarian types trying to sponge off the taxes of hard working tax payers via tax evasion need to stop being so greedy and stealing other peoples money.
It all depends on efficiency.
- If the tax money collected by the government is spent on a program which yields a higher return (by increasing the nation's productivity) than if the money had remained in private hands, then tax evasion is stealing from other taxpayers.
- OTOH if the government is spending money on programs which aren't more efficient than private use (or are even losing money), then tax evasion actually helps the economy (in totalitarian states, it leads to black markets) and it's the government which is being greedy and stealing people's money.
There's a tendency for libertarians to pretend only the second state exists, and for big-government proponents to pretend only the first state is possible. The reality is that either state is possible. We have to be constantly vigilant to appraise the effectiveness of government programs, and not afraid to cut the ones which become wasteful. But likewise, neither should we immediately dismiss all government programs as wasteful.
U.S. spending per student on education is among the highest in the world. Of all the problems which plague our education system, funding is definitely not one of them.
One can argue defense spending needs to be reduced. But proposing it should be spent on schools instead is just shifting money from one bloated program to another.
glass is a very worrying invention. no expectation of privacy in public is very different then lots of people being able to record everything they see.
It reminds me of the Isaac Azimov short story The Dead Past. The premise is (spoilers ahead) that there's a government conspiracy to control and limit access to a Chronoscope which can view any arbitrary point in the past like a video recording, allowing them to research things like how the ancient Greeks lived. The protagonists fight to expose this conspiracy and make the technology available to everyone. Only to realize just after they've released the plans for building it to the world that the past begins an instant ago, and the device can be used to watch anyone anywhere in near real-time.
I never thought we'd be seeing a technology with similar consequences developed in my lifetime.
perhaps $10 million for a lead actor is a slightly over the top wage
Because it's not. Or at least it wasn't. Back in the days when distribution required printing thousands of copies, inking deals with thousands of theaters to show them, and contacting hundreds of local TV stations, magazines, and newspapers for advertising. Back then the barrier to entry was so high that only a few companies could make widely-distributed movies. Which meant only a few movies could become national (or worldwide) memes. Which meant only a few movies could rake in hundreds of millions of dollars. Which meant the actors who could consistently help you create a blockbuster movie commanded extraordinarily high salaries.
The Internet completely pulls the rug out of that at the very lowest layer. Distribution is now essentially free, advertising nearly so especially if you can go viral. The obvious (well, obvious to me) outcome of all this is that whereas we used to have a few big studios, a few big movies, and a few big stars, now we're going to have lots of smaller studios, lots of smaller movies, and lots of small stars. Aggregate "filmmaking" revenue will go up, but it'll be distributed across a much larger population so average revenue per studio/movie/actor will go down. Yeah there will still be the blockbuster, but it's going to become increasingly rare (be sure to take into account inflation before you post any data claiming otherwise - the top grossing domestic film of all time in inflation-adjusted dollars is still 1939's Gone with the Wind).
The established studios are scared to death of this, so are fighting tooth and nail to prevent it and preserve their old, outdated business model. Just like happened with the VCR and movie rental stores. They fought those tooth and nail too, claiming they'd be the doom of the movie industry. Instead they turned into the lifeblood of the industry (tape/disc sales and rentals have long since surpassed movie theaters for revenue).
Be sure to specify exactly what happens if either party fails to fulfill their obligations under the contract. JEDEC failed to do so, and had no recourse when Rambus broke one of their rules and secretly patented stuff they heard being talked about at JEDEC for inclusion in an upcoming standard. The most they could do was kick Rambus out of JEDEC.
Same goes for self-employed independent contractors. If your contract just says you'll be paid $x upon completing the specific work, you are screwed. They can delay paying you for months without consequence. At the very least you need to put accruing penalties for late payment in the contract. Ideally you'll also have dates after which you can take the contract to a court and immediately get a summary judgment instead of having to go through a trial. Without a solid contract, once you hand over the money (for prepaid work) or the work (for post-paid work), all your leverage is gone. You are completely at the mercy of the other party.
Sounds like a poor contract is what happened here. Salesforce.com promised a lot and didn't deliver. My Pillow's contract didn't specify penalties or discounts/refunds for non-completion of work. Consequently all they could do was offer Salesforce.com more money to finish what they were supposed to have finished under the original contract. The opposite is possible too - that Salesforce.com did its beset to fulfill the contract, but My Pillow kept changing the requirements. In that case, the contract should've specified how many revisions to the requirements could be made, limits on how much they could change, and by what date they'd be finalized. Either way, it was a poor contract.
Deduplication is a neat concept in theory, but I would strongly recommend anyone hoping to use it to run some benchmarks first. In my tests of ZFS in Linux and FreeBSD, filesystem write performance dropped by 75%-90% when I turned deduplication on. I was using hefty hardware too (3.1 GHz i5 quad core, 8 GB of RAM).
With that sort of performance penalty, I can think of very few cases where you'd actually want to use deduplication. In most cases you'd be better off just buying more hard drives to increase storage space. Or maybe the Solaris version of ZFS performs much better.
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Intel's Atom processors typically retail for $30-$80, with some being more, some less. OEM pricing is lower. That's just the CPU so it's not directly comparable to ARM-based SoCs which I hear cost about $15-$25. So Intel is substantially higher priced, but not ruinously so from an end-user's purchase standpoint. Certainly not $650.
The more interesting thing to watch will be how this impacts the broader computing market. Intel has managed to stay ahead of the competition buoyed by the enormous profits it generates from its Core CPUs, which typically sell for $100-$400. As CPUs get faster, the general population can get by with something lower down the product chain. I've already been recommending i3s to most of my customers for the last couple years. I'm very close to dropping the bar to high-end Atom or AMD CPUs. As more and more of Intel's sales shift towards these lower-end CPUs, their overall profit margin will start to dry up. It's going to be interesting to watch how they'll react to that.
POTS works during power failures because the phone line itself carries enough power to operate a low-tech phone. Outside of hotels, I haven't seen one of these in over a decade. Every home phone I've seen is cordless and needs AC power. If you've got a battery backup, you can move it from the computer over to the landline phone to use it. But battery backups in homes are almost as rare as low-tech corded phones.
Cell phones will work for about an hour at least, until the batteries in the towers give out. That should cover 99.99% of blackouts. My cell phone has always worked during a blackout. In the one extended blackout I went through (3 days because fallen trees took out all the power and phone lines), if I went outside to a high spot my cell phone could pick up a distant powered tower, and I could make calls (note that only CDMA can do this; GSM has a range limit of about 20 miles due to being sensitive to lag caused by the speed of light).
In the old days, POTS would become useless immediately after a large earthquake. The shaking would knock all the vertically mounted pay phone handsets off the hook. Same for some home phones (the kind with a separate base and handset). These phones would tie up a POTS line even though nobody was calling. If you tried to make a call then, you'd get a fast busy signal (all circuits busy). You had to wait a few minutes for the phone company to time all those lines out and forcibly disconnect them. By which time everyone else was trying to call and it could take an hour before you could finally get a dial tone. TV news would constantly broadcast to resist the urge to call relatives to tell them you're ok and please stay off the phones, so emergency services and those calling 911 could get through first.
So it's not that POTS stands up better in earthquakes. It's that much fewer people use it nowadays, while the infrastructure that still remains was originally designed to handle a much larger volume of calls. As that equipment starts to break down and isn't replaced because the call volume isn't needed, POTS service will become as (un)reliable as cell phone service after these types of widescale disasters.
That's partly OP's point.
With private businesses, you have to accommodate the customer or you go out of business.
With public services, your customers have to accommodate you or they won't get the service you're providing.
In the 1980s, I was considered dorky for telling all my friends about this Internet thing, and how they should all check with their school to see if they could get an email address. By 2000, if you didn't have an email address, you were behind the times and a technological outcast.
Whether or not something is dorky is almost completely based on how fashionable it is. Speaking objectively, neckties are dorky. They serve absolutely no purpose, are an impediment to many activities, yet are required to fit in with many professions. Why? Because "everyone else wears them." That's really what it boils down to. If only nerds use Glass, then it will be considered dorky (like pocket protectors). If all the cool kids start to use it, then it will be considered fashionable. All you have to do is look at old movies and yearbooks to see how capricious this determination can be. The list of things which were considered fashionable at the time but we now consider silly include beehive hairstyles, horn-rimmed glasses, tail fins on cars, flower-print fonts, disco suits, tight shorts on guys, hot colors, etc. You can see even more if you go back to clothing styles from previous centuries. There's a lot of stuff which becomes mainstream not because it's useful or sensible, but merely because "everyone else wears it."
Samsung is already working on a solution to that. Basically, instead of your employer having full run of the phone, all the employer stuff is put into a sandboxed instance of the OS. Your personal phone runs into another sandboxed instance. Like having two virtual machines running simultaneously, you can flip between the two. Your employer has full control over one, and you have full control over the other.
I'm a little skeptical of how well it'll work in practice (backups will probably be problematic). But if they can pull it off, it will eliminate the need to carry two phones just because your workplace wants full access and control.
Pumped hydro is about 70%-80% efficient. So wind would have to be about 0.7-0.8x grid parity for stored wind energy to be economically viable. Charging losses for an EV are about 25%. So if you also factor in losses converting the EV's DC back into AC for transmission on the grid, it's going to be worse than 70% overall.
Also, yeah wind doesn't melt down. But it killed more people in 2011 than nuclear, despite providing only about 1/10th the power. The difference is that those deaths caused by wind weren't splashed all over the TV for weeks on end. It's not that wind is inherently safer. Don't get me wrong, after hydro, wind is the most viable of the renewables and I fully support its build-out. But a lot of people are basing their support on incomplete or inaccurate information, colored by what stories make jucier headlines on the evening news.
While unfortunate, I don't think that really matters in the bigger picture. If the price of coal dropped in Europe despite the availability of U.S. coal, that implies demand is down relative to supply, meaning the total coal used by the U.S. and Europe combined is still down. If consumption were up, coal prices would likewise be up, and Europe would have shifted back to natural gas.
I think this quote from the paper is more relevant to the specific issue of reducing coal consumption:
Simple solution. Set some rate, say a 5% surcharge, which covers all copyright infringement. The copyright holders are then free to negotiate/litigate among themselves on how to divide up that 3%.
If we can't get them to stop bothering us, maybe the best thing to do is to get them fighting each other so they're too busy to bother the rest of us.
Probably something to do with sovereign immunity. Like how the U.S. government extended immunity to the telecos for participating in warrantless wiretapping.
It hasn't "skyrocketed". You need to take into account inflation. My family moved to the U.S. in early 1973 (prior to the Arab oil embargo). Gas then was $0.35 per gallon.
Put $0.35 and 1973 into this handy-dandy inflation calculator and you get $1.83. So after you subtract out inflation, the price of gas has increased by about 2x in 40 years. That's hardly "skyrocketing."
While I generally agree, you have to be careful to take into account current interest rates. Renewables are notorious for front-loading their costs. Solar isn't the most expensive form of electricity generation because it costs a lot to maintain and operate PV panels. It's the most expensive because PV panels cost a lot to manufacture and buy, and you have to amortize that up-front cost over the lifetime of the panels.
Right now, interest rates have been at a historical low for over 5 years. This means that amortizing up-front costs is really cheap. If you pay $100 up-front and amortize it over 10 years at 4%, you're paying a total of $148. OTOH if we take interest rates from the early 1980s when it peaked at just over 20%, the same $100 over 10 years would cost you $619. So the current fiscal environment has been very friendly to renewables (and nuclear for that matter). But once we get out of the current economic downturn and interest rates start to creep up again, I expect renewables to become more expensive.
(Then you have to subtract out the effect of inflation from the compounded interest. But in general interest rates are slightly higher than inflation, so the above still holds true. It's just not quite as extreme as the raw numbers might suggest.)
I don't have a problem with funding research and development into improving renewables technology. As you say, it's a prudent investment in the future, and will let us switch energy sourcees quickly when the time arrives.
I do have a problem with offering cash incentives for consumers to adopt technologies which are currently not cost-effective. That's a net drain on our economy, and hampers our ability to divert additional money to research overall. It'd be like if the government of Japan had offered its citizens big incentives to buy analog HDTVs in the 1980s. That could have cost their economy tens of billions of dollars for technology which became obsolete when digital HDTV became feasible in the 1990s. Since Japan wisely limited their investment to funding for HDTV research, all they lost in that transition was the few billion they'd invested in analog HDTV R&D.
(I'll add a caveat that there is justification for cash incentives with technologies which actually are cost-effective long-term, but whose high up-front costs discourage adoption. In general, people are notoriously bad at saving money for a down payment. So if a technology with a high up-front cost reduces lifetime costs overall, then a purchase incentive program is warranted. Buyback programs to dispose of old, inefficient refrigerators and get people to replace them with new efficient ones are a good example.)
IMHO it's a bit of a misnomer to try to categorize all these devices according to their form - phone, tablet, notebook, desktop, etc. They're all PCs (personal computers, not IBM compatible PCs), and as such all of them can pretty much perform the same functions. We've already passed the point where the input devices need not be integrated into the PC - you can connect any old bluetooth versions wirelessly. And we rapidly approaching the point where you can decouple the display as well (Intel's WiDi, though not widely used, shows it's technically feasible).
If you've taken apart a phone or tablet, or even a notebook, you know that the "computer" part of it only occupies a small circuit board. This part is going to continue to get smaller (e.g. Raspberry Pi and MK808). My prediction is in the future, your phone or maybe even your watch will contain the CPU, RAM, and storage. A "tablet" will just be a 7"-12" screen and digitizer which connects wirelessly with your phone. A "laptop" will just be the "tablet" plus a wireless keyboard and mouse.
If you look at who controlled both branches of Congress during those same years (you know, the branch which actually makes the laws and budgets), you'd come to pretty much the opposite conclusion. But everyone is so eager to slice and dice the data until they find a pattern which fits their preconceived conclusions, then espouse that singular slice as if it explains everything.
People like simple answers because they don't like having to think so hard about things. Now think about that. The main conclusion I've reached after watching 30 years of politics is that exhibiting high certainty on a complex political issue is negatively correlated to how much one has tried to actually understand the issue. The very fact that we're even debating this, instead of the world having been taken over by those who practice one or the other oh-so-obviously superior ideology, is a pretty strong indication that the influence of these political choices on events is actually pretty small.
It looks like you're trying to fire your gun.
Would you like help?
- Shooting inanimate targets for practice.
- Hunting deer or other wild game.
- Driving off assailants and criminals.
- I am a law enforcement officer trying to stop a dangerous suspect.
- Testing my gun's functionality after maintenance.
- Firing bullets randomly into the air (i.e. celebratory gunfire)
- Combating a foreign invasion or insurgent rebellion.
- Just fire the damn gun.
( ) Don't show me this tip again.
No you don't want that. If that's how the law worked, every open source project would lose their copyrights after 5 years, and the GPL, BSD license, etc. would become pretty useless. Likewise, if you and your wife videotaped yourselves having sex 6 years ago, and someone repairing your home found it and copied it, they'd be free to release it to the public with no repercussions because it was public domain.
Copyright is for controlling distribution of a work you've created. Not necessarily making money off of it.
Money isn't some abstract thing we can create at will. Money is a representation of productivity. No matter how we try to manipulate it, its value will tend towards a steady state which equates its availability with productivity. If you're not producing something or helping improve someone else's productivity, you're not contributing to the economy, and thus you don't get any money.
If you try to guarantee each individual a basic income, what happens depends on how the individuals react. If the individuals on average don't change their behavior and continue working as before, then nothing changes. OTOH if some individuals realize they'll be paid regardless and so stop working, then average productivity will decrease. Whereas the economy used to produce 100 widgets per year, it now produces 80. In this case, since you've fixed the income, the same amount of money is forced to circulate as before, so prices will rise. The economy used to produce 100 widgets and pay $100 in wages so each widget used to cost $1. But now the economy produces 80 widgets while still paying $100 in wages, so each widget now costs $1.25.
The problem is we listened to those who wanted to protect jobs in the 1970s and 1980s. We resisted the urge to automate in order to preserve menial assembly line jobs. That was great for the protecting the workers' jobs in the short term, but long-term it led to the outsourcing of not only their jobs to China in the late 1990s and 2000s, but the factories as well. So they lost their jobs anyway, and they also lost the opportunity to retrain to become a robot operator/repairman in their old factory. The factory owner got screwed too - he lost a ton of money or even went bankrupt when his factory closed. The companies which placed orders with the factories only benefit because they still own the product line. The end result is the same for them, it's just the manufacturing step which has changed locations.
All of us know the lesson here. We've had it pounded into our heads since childhood when we first heard the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. When given a choice between a better long-term outcome which has bad short-term consequences, or a better short-term outcome which has bad long-term consequences, it's almost always better to prioritize the long-term. Note that the industries which openly embraced automation and robots - e.g. the auto industry - still do most of their manufacturing in the U.S. It's mostly the factories which didn't automate or were difficult to automate - steel, textiles, electronics assembly - which have almost completely shifted overseas.
This is a problem I see over and over. People fail to properly take opportunity costs into account and deliberately stack the comparison to force it to produce the outcome they want. In the 1980s they would insist on comparing the labor situation (and nothing else) if robots replaced workers (fewer jobs), vs. if nothing else changed except robots didn't take their jobs (more jobs). They completely ignored the positives which came with automation (lowering of manufacturing costs leading to lower prices, and competitiveness with low-wage labor in developing countries), and the possible long-term negative consequences of their preferred choice never crossed their mind.
The owner of Foxconn gets it. He realizes wages are rising in China, and that China isn't going to remain the lowest-bid manufacturer of choice of the West for long if they persist using manual labor. So he's trying to automate his factories with robots as quickly as possible. He doesn't want Vietnam or Thailand to do to him what China did to us. Some of the workers in China are complaining about it now, but they'll be thanking him in 10-20 years when those manufacturing factories still exist to employ Chinese workers instead of everything having been moved to other countries.
Part of the problem with searching through a collapsed building is the risk of further collapses. Rescuers have been killed by subsequent collapses during an aftershock or when removing a chunk of debris caused remaining debris to shift and fall. And quite frequently the rescuers are forced to abandon a building because the engineers deem it too unstable to safely search when nobody knows if there's even anyone still alive inside.
With a robot you could search regardless of the safety risks, and concentrate rescue efforts which risk rescuers' lives only at locations where you know there's someone still alive.
It's a double-entendre. The Freedom is the lead ship in a new class of Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), designed to operate in shallow waters close to shore. It replaces the frigate (smaller than destroyers, typically used as escorts). The Navy tries to keep its main line ships away from shore, out of range of land-based radar and gun and missile batteries. The Freedom class ships are big enough to replace frigates in escort duty in open water, but have the freedom to operate closer to shore.
Previous ships which filled the near-shore role were much smaller (minesweepers and patrol boats) and typically needed frequent refueling to travel long distances. Hence the double-entendre in the name of the other class of LCS - the USS Independence.
The difference is that you pay to grow one plant, then it replicates on its own until you have millions of them. So you pay for the first plant, then the rest are essentially free. Solar cells and LED bulbs OTOH don't grow on trees - you're paying the same high fixed cost to manufacture each panel or bulb.
And if you think about it, what's hindering wide-scale PV and LED adoption right now? High up-front costs.
The solar constant (energy flux of sunlight at Earth's orbit) is about 1360 W/m^2. A bit more than half of that reaches the earth's surface - about 750-800 W/m^2 (the rest being absorbed by the atmosphere). The 125 W/m^2 commonly quoted is the power output of widely-available 15% efficient PV panels under ideal condditions at the Earth's surface.
It all depends on efficiency.
- If the tax money collected by the government is spent on a program which yields a higher return (by increasing the nation's productivity) than if the money had remained in private hands, then tax evasion is stealing from other taxpayers.
- OTOH if the government is spending money on programs which aren't more efficient than private use (or are even losing money), then tax evasion actually helps the economy (in totalitarian states, it leads to black markets) and it's the government which is being greedy and stealing people's money.
There's a tendency for libertarians to pretend only the second state exists, and for big-government proponents to pretend only the first state is possible. The reality is that either state is possible. We have to be constantly vigilant to appraise the effectiveness of government programs, and not afraid to cut the ones which become wasteful. But likewise, neither should we immediately dismiss all government programs as wasteful.
U.S. spending per student on education is among the highest in the world. Of all the problems which plague our education system, funding is definitely not one of them.
One can argue defense spending needs to be reduced. But proposing it should be spent on schools instead is just shifting money from one bloated program to another.
It reminds me of the Isaac Azimov short story The Dead Past. The premise is (spoilers ahead) that there's a government conspiracy to control and limit access to a Chronoscope which can view any arbitrary point in the past like a video recording, allowing them to research things like how the ancient Greeks lived. The protagonists fight to expose this conspiracy and make the technology available to everyone. Only to realize just after they've released the plans for building it to the world that the past begins an instant ago, and the device can be used to watch anyone anywhere in near real-time.
I never thought we'd be seeing a technology with similar consequences developed in my lifetime.
Because it's not. Or at least it wasn't. Back in the days when distribution required printing thousands of copies, inking deals with thousands of theaters to show them, and contacting hundreds of local TV stations, magazines, and newspapers for advertising. Back then the barrier to entry was so high that only a few companies could make widely-distributed movies. Which meant only a few movies could become national (or worldwide) memes. Which meant only a few movies could rake in hundreds of millions of dollars. Which meant the actors who could consistently help you create a blockbuster movie commanded extraordinarily high salaries.
The Internet completely pulls the rug out of that at the very lowest layer. Distribution is now essentially free, advertising nearly so especially if you can go viral. The obvious (well, obvious to me) outcome of all this is that whereas we used to have a few big studios, a few big movies, and a few big stars, now we're going to have lots of smaller studios, lots of smaller movies, and lots of small stars. Aggregate "filmmaking" revenue will go up, but it'll be distributed across a much larger population so average revenue per studio/movie/actor will go down. Yeah there will still be the blockbuster, but it's going to become increasingly rare (be sure to take into account inflation before you post any data claiming otherwise - the top grossing domestic film of all time in inflation-adjusted dollars is still 1939's Gone with the Wind).
The established studios are scared to death of this, so are fighting tooth and nail to prevent it and preserve their old, outdated business model. Just like happened with the VCR and movie rental stores. They fought those tooth and nail too, claiming they'd be the doom of the movie industry. Instead they turned into the lifeblood of the industry (tape/disc sales and rentals have long since surpassed movie theaters for revenue).
Be sure to specify exactly what happens if either party fails to fulfill their obligations under the contract. JEDEC failed to do so, and had no recourse when Rambus broke one of their rules and secretly patented stuff they heard being talked about at JEDEC for inclusion in an upcoming standard. The most they could do was kick Rambus out of JEDEC.
Same goes for self-employed independent contractors. If your contract just says you'll be paid $x upon completing the specific work, you are screwed. They can delay paying you for months without consequence. At the very least you need to put accruing penalties for late payment in the contract. Ideally you'll also have dates after which you can take the contract to a court and immediately get a summary judgment instead of having to go through a trial. Without a solid contract, once you hand over the money (for prepaid work) or the work (for post-paid work), all your leverage is gone. You are completely at the mercy of the other party.
Sounds like a poor contract is what happened here. Salesforce.com promised a lot and didn't deliver. My Pillow's contract didn't specify penalties or discounts/refunds for non-completion of work. Consequently all they could do was offer Salesforce.com more money to finish what they were supposed to have finished under the original contract. The opposite is possible too - that Salesforce.com did its beset to fulfill the contract, but My Pillow kept changing the requirements. In that case, the contract should've specified how many revisions to the requirements could be made, limits on how much they could change, and by what date they'd be finalized. Either way, it was a poor contract.
Deduplication is a neat concept in theory, but I would strongly recommend anyone hoping to use it to run some benchmarks first. In my tests of ZFS in Linux and FreeBSD, filesystem write performance dropped by 75%-90% when I turned deduplication on. I was using hefty hardware too (3.1 GHz i5 quad core, 8 GB of RAM).
With that sort of performance penalty, I can think of very few cases where you'd actually want to use deduplication. In most cases you'd be better off just buying more hard drives to increase storage space. Or maybe the Solaris version of ZFS performs much better.