IMO it will never happen. Imagine the following tagline:
"Have enough electricity for 20 years"
Do you really think any power plant company will want this?
About 20 years ago a friend and I were discussing hard disks. My first PC had a 300 MB hard drive, and he had just gotten one with a 1 GB drive. I noted how capacity was growing, and some day we would have 1 TB drives. He said no, the hard drive manufacturers would never allow it. According to him, 1 TB was so much storage you could buy one and never have to buy another drive for the rest of your life. No way the hard drive manufacturers would ever sell something which put themselves out of business.
Well, we all know how that turned out. If you build it, people will find a use for it. For energy, off the top of my head I can think of a few tremendously high-power applications which will probably become feasible with the advent of cheap power. You can desalinate all the drinking and irrigation water the entire planet needs. You can atomize toxic compounds like dioxins, decomposing them into their constituent elements. You can convert CO2 back into O2 gas and carbon (soot), reversing a century of greenhouse gas emissions. You can power railguns to launch large quantities of fuel and other supplies into orbit to construct spacecraft for manned interplanetary missions (currently the energy cost is $5k-$10k per kg put into low earth orbit).
So the power companies may not be making as much money selling household power. But they'll certainly be making money selling power for other uses. Probably a lot more money than they're making now.
My opinion is that cellular service, the network/towers, and phones should be mutually exclusive. You buy your own phone, and can activate it on any carrier (supporting similar technology). If the carrier wishes to subsidize phones by giving you a loan for your phone purchase, they can. But you still have to buy the phone elsewhere. That way phone manufacturers compete purely on what their phones can do, regardless of what carrier you end up using it with.
Likewise, the carriers would ink contracts with companies owning towers in a region to put together their own patchwork nationwide network (your phone already does this - it as a preferred roaming list saying which towers it's allowed to talk to). If they're unhappy with the coverage in a region, they can contract for more towers, or drop contracts for one company's towers in preference for another company's towers. That way people don't feel like they have to choose a specific carrier because they have the best physical tower network. And small startup carriers aren't forced to pay big carriers just to have access to towers.
Finally the companies operating the towers would be competing with each other for the carriers as customers. If you put together a crappy tower network, the carriers won't contract with you or will negotiate for lower prices. If you put together a good tower network, they will be beating on the door with money in hand.
The "carrier sells you the phones and owns the towers" was probably a necessary step to get past the chicken and egg stage of no phones and no towers without customers, no customers without phones and towers. But we're beyond that now and need to tweak the market to make it overcome the natural monopolistic tendencies of exclusive phones and towers, so it can operate more efficiently.
The 747 has something like 150 miles of wiring. The 787, which was specifically designed to reduce the amount of wiring, still has some 60 miles of wires. There's a lot of opportunity for miswiring something.
No, Apple did the primitive stuff in ROM in 1984 because ROM was much cheaper than RAM. In fact everyone did the same thing. The stereotypical 40 column (or 80 column) text displays from those days didn't actually draw characters. The instructions for drawing the individual characters were actually stored in the video card's ROM. The "display" was just a 40x24 or 80x24 grid of bytes, each one coding which character was to be drawn in sequence. The computer would tell the video card what character was supposed to be in each grid block, and the video card would run the ROM routine to draw the character at that location, then move on to the next block until the entire screen was drawn. Then next screen refresh cycle it would do it all over again. That way instead of having to store all the pixels of the entire rendered screen in RAM, you only had to store the characters in RAM, and instructions for drawing each character in ROM.
That's why the first Mac was monochrome despite having only a 512x342 fully addressable display. By making it monochrome, the graphical display only needed a bit less than 22 kB of video RAM. If they'd tried to make it, say, 8-bit 256 colors, it would've needed 171 kB of video RAM. The Mac only came with 128 kB of system RAM.
The same problem has plagued 3D til now. An 80x24 display only had 1920 characters. Going to a fully addressable 2D screen required about a thousand-fold increase in cost-effective storage space. Going to fully addressable 3D again required about a thousand-fold increase in cost-effective storage. A modest 1024^3 array of voxels in 24-bit color requires 3GB of RAM. A memory amount which has only become realistic in recent years. Up til now we've been doing the same ROM trick to make do with less RAM by calculating 3D graphics in vector form, then projecting the final results onto a fully-addressable 2D raster screen. The people who were doing this weren't behind. The hardware was, and they were just making do with the best hardware that was widely available.
That said, mathematically, going from 1D (a string of 1920 characters) to 2D is very different than going from 2D to 3D. All sorts of limits and convergences change. So I'm not entirely sure a fully addressable 3D array is the best solution for a 3D display. The current vector tricks may continue to be optimal.
There is another drawback. Yes it can be used to give amputees sensation in their artificial limbs. But I'm sure there are people out their looking forward to this as a method of torture without physical damage. So we've got yet another technological log to throw on the dual-use bonfire, along with screwdrivers for turning screws or picking locks, guns for hunting or killing, bittorrent for file distribution or illegal copying, etc.
'The employees cash in stock options, and at that point there is tax deduction for the company,' Robert McIntyre, of watchdog group Citizens for Tax Justice, said. 'Because even though it doesn't cost Facebook a nickel, the government treats it as wages and they get a deduction for it.'"
Sigh. Yes it does cost Facebook money. If they hadn't given those stock options to their employees, they could've (A) sold the shares during their IPO and made a ton more money, or (B) not issued those shares at all meaning there were fewer overall shares, meaning each share would've been valued higher, meaning they would've made a ton more money during the IPO. Just because you don't know how to properly account for opportunity costs doesn't mean it didn't cost them a nickel.
The deduction seems to be designed to encourage companies to give shares (i.e. partial ownership) to their employees, in preference to selling on the market where "only rich people" can partake in the market and passive income dividends.
More succinctly, what is the future cost of allowing these two guys to go free to continue his/their crime spree? And what is the cost of all the copycat twins who'll do the same thing once a precedent has been set that the police won't prosecute twins if they can't tell which one did it?
If that cost is more than the 1 million euro test, then pay for the test.
If you read TFA, the judge's decision is quite a bit more nuanced than the summary makes it out to be:
The court, however, agreed with Krol that the detection of defects in the protection of confidential, medical data can serve a substantial public interest. Krol said he acted as a journalist and ethical hacker at the time of the breach.
The fact that he logged into the website and consulted some files was not unlawful, the court said. Similarly, downloading and printing the files to demonstrate the failures and scale of the security risk are defensible, it added. Krol also handled the information carefully because he redacted the printed files, the court noted.
It was however disproportional that Krol proceeded to view and print more files than necessary to prove his point, the court said. In addition, he should have given the laboratory more time to fix the problem and should have tried to contact them more than once before he informed the media, the court said.
Krol only knew of one employee that acted carelessly with login information. "Therefore, the problem was not so acute that immediate use of media was necessary," the court said.
Sounds like the Dutch have some good judges exercising common sense on this issue.
This has been a complaint too. For a state with a population of 38 million is (figure half of them drive) it's about 119,000 per DMV office. At 250 working days a year, that's 475 per office per day, or about 59 people per hour. That shouldn't be that hard, but the lines there are typically 1-3 hours long. They have a reservation system where you can make an appointment in advance. But the last time my registration came up for renewal, there was a problem which required me to visit the DMV instead of renew by mail. I tried to use their reservation system, only to discover that even though I was trying to make an appointment the day after I got the mailed notice, all the nearby DMV offices were booked solid until 3 weeks after the renewal deadline. I ended up making a reservation at some DMV office in the desert 70 miles away (still had to wait in line 45 min), and used the trip as an excuse to do some sightseeing and visit some friends in the area.
If you have a AAA membership, that's by far the best way to get your DMV stuff done in California (if it's a service they can do - they don't do driving tests and a few other things). I've never had to wait more than 30 min there, and usually they get to me within 5 minutes. They charge a few dollars more, but it's worth it compared to wasting several hours at the DMV.
In contrast, the RMV in Massachusetts and the DMV in Washington had wait times very similar to the AAA. Massachusetts even puts offices in the mall so parking is convenient and you can drop by while getting other shopping done. So I dunno what California is doing wrong, but whatever it is they're doing it very, very wrong.
I noticed that too when Tesla first produced the logs. Broder explained it as the remaining range dropping overnight, and Tesla employees telling him that's normal and it'll come back if he "conditioned" the battery by running the heater for about 30 min. Which the logs show is exactly what he did. Whether Tesla employees actually told him to do that OTOH is still open for debate.
What cold hard facts? People who, unlike this reporter, have some brains, and enough money to buy an electric almost universally love them.
And people who love tech enough to build their own computers universally love them. While this reporter may not have had brains, I think his experience more accurately reflects what would happen if you put an electric car in the hands of a non-enthusiast tech-illiterate driver. I've had to do enough tech support for family and friends to know that they'll do all sorts of stupid stuff which is quite obvious to me that they shouldn't do.
The reason Apple is so successful is because they dumb down the tech to the point where those non-enthusiast tech-illiterate users have no problems using it. That's what needs to happen to electric cars before they'll be widely accepted. If the experience of enthusiasts mattered as much as you seem to think, your grandmother would be using Linux on the desktop today. And just like Linux, if you're going to blame problems in using the tech solely on the stupidity of users, it's going to languish at 1% market share.
Personally, I think Broder is a tool who set out to jeopardize the test drive if he could. But at the same time I can't fault him for sensationalizing the problem with charge times and charge rates. That's a huge difference between EVs and ICE vehicles, and it needs to be stressed over and over to the public until it becomes "common sense" that you can't just fill 'er up in 5 minutes like you can with gasoline. The sooner everyone is made aware of that drawback, the sooner it will cease becoming a problem.
Why jump from station to station on as little power as possible. He should have powered up the car to its max before leaving every station, not just enough to make it to the next one.
Because it's an electric car. It's not like a gasoline car where filling the tank takes twice as much time as filling half a tank. The charge you get doesn't ramp up linearly with time. It starts off charging quickly, then slows down. If you charge it up to max, you're going to be sitting at the charging station for several hours. The quickest way to get from one place to another (minimizing charge times) is to use about a 50% quick-charge at each stop (supposed to take a half hour).
If you look at the logs Tesla posted, you can see that's exactly what he did. The two interim supercharges gave him approx 200 and 150 miles in range. The controversial Norwich charge was not a supercharge station, so he would've been there overnight if he'd charged to full there. He did the prudent thing - take on only as much charge as needed to get to the next supercharge station. Except according to him, Tesla employees told him he could get there with a smaller charge than the mileage meter showed was needed. According to Musk, his employees told him no such thing.
The speed is something he can't tell the truth about. Everybody drives faster than the speed limit. Everybody. But you can't admit to breaking the law in a national newspaper. So you just write that you were going below 55 mph (speed limit in New York IIRC) and following the flow of traffic, and most readers understand that you were going 65-75. The logs Tesla posted show he was driving above the speed limit like everyone does, so he needed some CYA to avoid admitting to a traffic violation.
Most car reviews sidestep this problem by testing on a closed private track. Or not mentioning speeds.
From my understanding, the group made a good faith offering of ronpaul.org to Ron Paul for free but wanted $250,000 for the commercial ronpaul.com in order to recoup the work and effort they put in. On top of that, I see nothing malicious, untruthful, slanderous or libelous on ronpaul.com -- quite the opposite!
Please read the UDRP. The amount of money and time you put into building the website is irrelevant and non-recoupable. All you can legitimately ask the trademark holder for is your costs to acquire and administrative costs directly related to maintaining the domain. If you're upset that you'd be losing all the work you put into building up the site and the mailing lists, well then you shouldn't have built it on a domain name which clearly infringes someone else's trademark.
The fact that there's nothing malicious, untruthful, nor libelous on the site is irrelevant. The standard used is whether the site name and content could be confused as belonging to or being endorsed by the trademark holder. You're judging Ron Paul using your own made-up imaginary rules which don't even match the actual rules. I think it's a dick move by Ron Paul against people who clearly are (or were) his supporters. But the rules you're using to evaluate it carry no legal weight.
I was under the impression ronpaul.com was a volunteer effort. But if you're correct that it's commercial (the site owners are making money off of it), then that's two strikes against them - commercial use of a domain matching someone else's trademark, and asking the trademark holder $250,000 for it. ICANN is virtually guaranteed to take the domain away from them. Anybody who owns a domain needs to read the UDRP so they know exactly how tenuous their "ownership" of the domain really is.
He was offered (a) an option to buy the site, for, given that it's a political site, quite a reasonable sum
That's a violation of ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. Offering to sell a domain matching a trademark to the trademark holder is evidence of bad faith registration (section 4b(i)), and grounds for awarding the domain to the trademark holder. If Ron Paul had offered to buy it and stated an amount, they would have been fine. If they'd told him to piss off and given him the finger they would've been fine. But they really screwed the pooch by stating on their own that they'd sell it to him for $250,000. There's a good chance they're going to lose the domain to him.
Remember this if you own a domain that someone else wants to buy. Never ask for an amount. Even if they say they're interested in buying and how much would you want for it, don't state an amount. Let them come to you with an amount first, then you can negotiate. If you're the first one to state the amount, they can nail you with section 4b(i). The guy who owns nissan.com (he sells computers and Nissan is his last name) almost lost it because Nissan (the car company) kept bugging him to sell. And out of exasperation one day he told them (in Dr. Evil fashion), "$1 million dollars. How many times do I have to tell you, I'm not going to sell it."
Contrary to all the knee-jerk criticism heaped upon him by anti-liberterians who've probably never heard of ICANN or the UDNDRP, Ron Paul is doing the right thing here - working within the rules of ICANN to get the dispute resolved.
Not only that, but every acre of ethanol production corn is one less acre of food for human or animal consumption.
You have to understand how all this started. During the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, there were widespread food shortages. The government vowed never again, and began subsidizing food production to insure there was always an oversupply. Mostly corn. The government agrees to buy corn at a fixed price if the market price drops below a certain floor. So corn farmers overproduce. If there's a cold snap or a pest-related crop failure, we have a bigger buffer before we begin suffering food shortages.
So each year we produce more corn than we can consume. What do you do with all that extra corn? Some of it gets shipped off as humanitarian foreign aid. A lot of it gets used as feed for livestock. In the mid-1900s someone figured out how to convert it into high fructose corn syrup as a substitute for cane sugar. And in the 1970s right after the Arab oil embargo, someone got the bright idea, "why don't we convert it into fuel for cars?"
It makes sense as long as you're dealing with excess corn. Its corn which would otherwise grow moldy in silos. So the fact that it's energy intensive doesn't really matter. It's a sunk cost. We've already paid for it; the only question is how much use can we get out of it. So in that respect, the corn ethanol program - or anything for that matter - makes more sense than letting it rot in silos.
But all that goes out the window the moment you start growing corn specifically to convert into ethanol. Then it's no longer excess corn, it hasn't already been paid for, and the economics of it fall apart and make no sense unless you're a lobbyist and politician in Washington.
Historically, the AUD has been worth about 0.75 USD (click on 10 year). It wasn't until the global financial meltdown that the AUD shot up in value to where it surpassed parity with the USD (Australia's economy wasn't hurt as much because they didn't have a housing bubble at the time, though they have one now). If you compare before and after, the AUD increased in value by about 40% against the USD. If you compare the software prices, they too are about 40% higher. Surprise, surprise.
When companies conduct business internationally, they usually negotiate a fixed exchange rate for a year (or a quarter). It helps insulate their annual financial planning from fluctuations in the currency markets. So when the AUD first shot up, the vendors importing US software still had to pay 1.3 AUD per 1.0 USD, even though 1.3 AUD was now worth closer to 1.4 USD. The next year when they went to negotiate currency exchange prices again, the US companies said "OMG! You want a 40% price cut? You can't be serious!" And the Australian vendors didn't have purchasing power to negotiate a better deal. So year after year they got shafted with prices based on pre-2007 exchange rates. (In the US companies' defense, they probably argued that if the AUD shot up 40% in a year, it could drop 40% the next year, and they weren't willing to take that big a risk and adjust the exchange rate by that large an amount. But it's unconscionable that it's continued for 5 years.)
Read TFA. This would allow you to do exactly that.
a program that is installed by or on behalf of a person to prevent, detect, investigate, or terminate activities that the person reasonably believes (i) present a risk or threatens the security, privacy, or unauthorized or fraudulent use, of a computer system, telecommunications facility, or network, or (ii) involves the contravention of any law of Canada, of a province or municipality of Canada or of a foreign state;
So if you think a police officer, politician, or someone working at the government is breaking any law - Canadian, provincial, or foreign, you can break into their network and computers and install your rootkit and keylogger. Hackers and groups like Anonymous would simply have to claim "we broken into the system because we suspected the owner was violating Moldavian law" or something like that, and they'd be in the clear.
A previous company I worked at helped create 1278.1 (DIS). And you're correct that it's able to handle massive numbers of simulated entities interacting (easily tens of thousands; I think they managed one sim with over 100,000 entities in the mid-1990s). The crucial difference from the simulated shared environment most of us are familiar with (online games) is that the participants don't cheat. Hacking your client so it doesn't operate as programmed defeats the purpose of running a sim. Whereas in a game it's frequently in the player's best interest to cheat by hacking their client.
So in an online game, all the position, movement, actions, and collisions have to be handled by a centralized server to make it impossible to cheat. With DIS, each client calculates its own interactions and simply multicasts the consequences (e.g. movement changes) to all the other sim participants. e.g. The F-16 sim tells everyone it drops a bomb from its location with this trajectory. The M1A2 tank sim uses that to calculate that it was hit and destroyed, and it tells everyone "I'm dead now."
Since all these calculations are distributed, your computing power scales with the number of participants, unlike an online game where the server computing power is fixed. And the primary limitation on scalability is how much traffic the network can handle (the spec calls for a very minimal packet size, and a lot of work went into decreasing the frequency with which an individual sim needed to multicast updates).
if it's so good business renting them, you'd think they'd accommodate for it and just tax it accordingly.
Normally I'd agree with the free market approach. But having visited Amsterdam, I can see why they wouldn't want to accommodate it. Pretty much the entire city can be traversed by walking/biking (there are a *lot* of bikes there). If they want to keep it that way and slow the growth of the city, then they want to maximize utilization of the buildings that are there.
Tourists rental apartments which sit empty half the time waste space, and drive up prices for residents by adding tourists to the demand side of the equation. I can see the city's logic here. Divide the real estate economy into two separate groups - residents and tourists. Confine the tourists to hotels so the market prices for tourists' housing expenses are decoupled from the market prices for residents' housing expenses. That way as more or fewer tourists visit, the price for hotel rooms will rise or fall. But they won't affect the price of residential apartments in the city.
The market approach solves the higher housing prices by sprawling the city outward, expanding its size. Real estate on the periphery has (initially) lower prices, thus encouraging people to move outwards rather than stay in the center. But much of the charm of Amsterdam is in how accessible the entire city is by foot or bike, and the lack of skyscrapers. If the city wants to preserve that, then segregating tourist housing from residential housing makes sense.
The reason for this is pretty simple. In a market (in anything really), you have random noise. In a poorly functioning economy, the inefficiencies have a much larger impact on the economy that the noise. So it's easy for an economist to make accurate predictions.
When an economy develops, it does so by reducing or eliminating inefficiencies. In a well-developed economy like most Western economies, the inefficiencies are so small that their effect is usually swamped out by random noise. Random noise which turns most predictions into a coin toss.
Or for a non-economic analogy, the fact that Los Angeles now has clean air doesn't mean the air quality standards its implemented are now unnecessary. We're probably at the point where the number of dirty trucks randomly entering/leaving the city have a greater effect on the overall air quality than implementing or repealing different individual air quality regulations. But that doesn't mean the air quality regulations are useless and it's ok for us to just throw them all out.
Or, since corporations are "persons", why not tax them in an analogous fashion?
Only if you want to give them the right to vote. No taxation without representation, right?
Most of this tax corporations vs tax individuals rhetoric is nonsense. In the end it doesn't matter which you tax - they both represent money that's diverted from the private sector into the public sector. If you shifted all individual taxes to corporations, that doesn't mean individuals would be able to buy more. It means the prices of the (corporation-produced) goods they buy would rise and exactly cancel out the extra income they'd take home from not being taxed.
Average real take-home pay scales with productivity per person, not whether you focus taxes on individuals or corporations.
Just go back to the old system. Banks cannot be investment brokerages. Investment brokerages cannot be banks. Then the only risk banks can take is in making loans. They shouldn't be trying to make money gambling in the stock market using depositors' money as their nest egg. They should be making money via interest they earn by making smart loans with depositors' money.
They begin with" I never asked for a data plan when I bought my LG flip phone." An I point out they are using an iphone, they usually claim they are not even though we can see it on the network, from the time they stuck their sim card in it. And most of the time they lie about it. We used to be able to lock down smartphones without any data, but the problem is that part of the data plan is used to offset the higher level of support required with smartphones, and unfortunately only about 10% of Iphone users actually no how to use them, and the rest need hand holding. I call it the George Jetson syndrome, they only have one button to press, and they whine about doing that. We started getting tons of users with off contract Iphone they were given, bought, or found, and they stuck their sim cards in them. Now these people want no data but want support in connecting via wifi to check their email, facebook, use company vpns, play words with friends, and all the neato things they can do. They want support for it, but without paying the toll.
This is entirely your fault. The carriers that is. You complain about people wanting support without paying the toll. Yet you charge people the subsidized phone monthly service rate even though they have an off-contract phone. (T-Mobile is the only major carrier who doesn't - they'll cut your monthly fee $10-$20/mo once you're out of contract and paid off the "subsidy" for your phone purchase.)
You're the one who decoupled the relationship between "service" and "toll", and turned it into one amorphous "monthly service fee". You can't act like it's all fine when it favors you (off-contract phone owners paying subsidized service rates), then in the next breath complain about it when it doesn't favor you (non-data plan users asking for non-data support for their phone). You're currently charging them a toll for a subsidized phone, even though it's not a subsidized phone. Turnabout is fair play - give them the damn support.
Those being regulated by the state have a fundamental right to representation in that state. We fought a war over this a little over 200 years ago ("no taxation without representation"). That representation can be via voting or via some vehicle with which to voice their concerns to the state (i.e. lobbying). So for better or for worse, corporations must be a part of the political process. There's a tendency on slashdot to assume everything a corporation does is bad, which simply isn't true. If a corporation sees a legitimate issue with a proposed law, there must be some way for them to voice it. Otherwise you'll end up with a bunch of bad laws.
What needs to happen is to remind politicians that they are ultimately accountable to the voters. They work for the public, so all meetings with lobbyists should legally be required to be videotaped and made available to the public. Meeting with a lobbyist in private should be illegal.
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About 20 years ago a friend and I were discussing hard disks. My first PC had a 300 MB hard drive, and he had just gotten one with a 1 GB drive. I noted how capacity was growing, and some day we would have 1 TB drives. He said no, the hard drive manufacturers would never allow it. According to him, 1 TB was so much storage you could buy one and never have to buy another drive for the rest of your life. No way the hard drive manufacturers would ever sell something which put themselves out of business.
Well, we all know how that turned out. If you build it, people will find a use for it. For energy, off the top of my head I can think of a few tremendously high-power applications which will probably become feasible with the advent of cheap power. You can desalinate all the drinking and irrigation water the entire planet needs. You can atomize toxic compounds like dioxins, decomposing them into their constituent elements. You can convert CO2 back into O2 gas and carbon (soot), reversing a century of greenhouse gas emissions. You can power railguns to launch large quantities of fuel and other supplies into orbit to construct spacecraft for manned interplanetary missions (currently the energy cost is $5k-$10k per kg put into low earth orbit).
So the power companies may not be making as much money selling household power. But they'll certainly be making money selling power for other uses. Probably a lot more money than they're making now.
My opinion is that cellular service, the network/towers, and phones should be mutually exclusive. You buy your own phone, and can activate it on any carrier (supporting similar technology). If the carrier wishes to subsidize phones by giving you a loan for your phone purchase, they can. But you still have to buy the phone elsewhere. That way phone manufacturers compete purely on what their phones can do, regardless of what carrier you end up using it with.
Likewise, the carriers would ink contracts with companies owning towers in a region to put together their own patchwork nationwide network (your phone already does this - it as a preferred roaming list saying which towers it's allowed to talk to). If they're unhappy with the coverage in a region, they can contract for more towers, or drop contracts for one company's towers in preference for another company's towers. That way people don't feel like they have to choose a specific carrier because they have the best physical tower network. And small startup carriers aren't forced to pay big carriers just to have access to towers.
Finally the companies operating the towers would be competing with each other for the carriers as customers. If you put together a crappy tower network, the carriers won't contract with you or will negotiate for lower prices. If you put together a good tower network, they will be beating on the door with money in hand.
The "carrier sells you the phones and owns the towers" was probably a necessary step to get past the chicken and egg stage of no phones and no towers without customers, no customers without phones and towers. But we're beyond that now and need to tweak the market to make it overcome the natural monopolistic tendencies of exclusive phones and towers, so it can operate more efficiently.
The 747 has something like 150 miles of wiring. The 787, which was specifically designed to reduce the amount of wiring, still has some 60 miles of wires. There's a lot of opportunity for miswiring something.
No, Apple did the primitive stuff in ROM in 1984 because ROM was much cheaper than RAM. In fact everyone did the same thing. The stereotypical 40 column (or 80 column) text displays from those days didn't actually draw characters. The instructions for drawing the individual characters were actually stored in the video card's ROM. The "display" was just a 40x24 or 80x24 grid of bytes, each one coding which character was to be drawn in sequence. The computer would tell the video card what character was supposed to be in each grid block, and the video card would run the ROM routine to draw the character at that location, then move on to the next block until the entire screen was drawn. Then next screen refresh cycle it would do it all over again. That way instead of having to store all the pixels of the entire rendered screen in RAM, you only had to store the characters in RAM, and instructions for drawing each character in ROM.
That's why the first Mac was monochrome despite having only a 512x342 fully addressable display. By making it monochrome, the graphical display only needed a bit less than 22 kB of video RAM. If they'd tried to make it, say, 8-bit 256 colors, it would've needed 171 kB of video RAM. The Mac only came with 128 kB of system RAM.
The same problem has plagued 3D til now. An 80x24 display only had 1920 characters. Going to a fully addressable 2D screen required about a thousand-fold increase in cost-effective storage space. Going to fully addressable 3D again required about a thousand-fold increase in cost-effective storage. A modest 1024^3 array of voxels in 24-bit color requires 3GB of RAM. A memory amount which has only become realistic in recent years. Up til now we've been doing the same ROM trick to make do with less RAM by calculating 3D graphics in vector form, then projecting the final results onto a fully-addressable 2D raster screen. The people who were doing this weren't behind. The hardware was, and they were just making do with the best hardware that was widely available.
That said, mathematically, going from 1D (a string of 1920 characters) to 2D is very different than going from 2D to 3D. All sorts of limits and convergences change. So I'm not entirely sure a fully addressable 3D array is the best solution for a 3D display. The current vector tricks may continue to be optimal.
There is another drawback. Yes it can be used to give amputees sensation in their artificial limbs. But I'm sure there are people out their looking forward to this as a method of torture without physical damage. So we've got yet another technological log to throw on the dual-use bonfire, along with screwdrivers for turning screws or picking locks, guns for hunting or killing, bittorrent for file distribution or illegal copying, etc.
Sigh. Yes it does cost Facebook money. If they hadn't given those stock options to their employees, they could've (A) sold the shares during their IPO and made a ton more money, or (B) not issued those shares at all meaning there were fewer overall shares, meaning each share would've been valued higher, meaning they would've made a ton more money during the IPO. Just because you don't know how to properly account for opportunity costs doesn't mean it didn't cost them a nickel.
The deduction seems to be designed to encourage companies to give shares (i.e. partial ownership) to their employees, in preference to selling on the market where "only rich people" can partake in the market and passive income dividends.
More succinctly, what is the future cost of allowing these two guys to go free to continue his/their crime spree? And what is the cost of all the copycat twins who'll do the same thing once a precedent has been set that the police won't prosecute twins if they can't tell which one did it?
If that cost is more than the 1 million euro test, then pay for the test.
Sounds like the Dutch have some good judges exercising common sense on this issue.
There isn't a DMV per municipality. There are about a hundred and sixty scattered around the state.
This has been a complaint too. For a state with a population of 38 million is (figure half of them drive) it's about 119,000 per DMV office. At 250 working days a year, that's 475 per office per day, or about 59 people per hour. That shouldn't be that hard, but the lines there are typically 1-3 hours long. They have a reservation system where you can make an appointment in advance. But the last time my registration came up for renewal, there was a problem which required me to visit the DMV instead of renew by mail. I tried to use their reservation system, only to discover that even though I was trying to make an appointment the day after I got the mailed notice, all the nearby DMV offices were booked solid until 3 weeks after the renewal deadline. I ended up making a reservation at some DMV office in the desert 70 miles away (still had to wait in line 45 min), and used the trip as an excuse to do some sightseeing and visit some friends in the area.
If you have a AAA membership, that's by far the best way to get your DMV stuff done in California (if it's a service they can do - they don't do driving tests and a few other things). I've never had to wait more than 30 min there, and usually they get to me within 5 minutes. They charge a few dollars more, but it's worth it compared to wasting several hours at the DMV.
In contrast, the RMV in Massachusetts and the DMV in Washington had wait times very similar to the AAA. Massachusetts even puts offices in the mall so parking is convenient and you can drop by while getting other shopping done. So I dunno what California is doing wrong, but whatever it is they're doing it very, very wrong.
I noticed that too when Tesla first produced the logs. Broder explained it as the remaining range dropping overnight, and Tesla employees telling him that's normal and it'll come back if he "conditioned" the battery by running the heater for about 30 min. Which the logs show is exactly what he did. Whether Tesla employees actually told him to do that OTOH is still open for debate.
And people who love tech enough to build their own computers universally love them. While this reporter may not have had brains, I think his experience more accurately reflects what would happen if you put an electric car in the hands of a non-enthusiast tech-illiterate driver. I've had to do enough tech support for family and friends to know that they'll do all sorts of stupid stuff which is quite obvious to me that they shouldn't do.
The reason Apple is so successful is because they dumb down the tech to the point where those non-enthusiast tech-illiterate users have no problems using it. That's what needs to happen to electric cars before they'll be widely accepted. If the experience of enthusiasts mattered as much as you seem to think, your grandmother would be using Linux on the desktop today. And just like Linux, if you're going to blame problems in using the tech solely on the stupidity of users, it's going to languish at 1% market share.
Personally, I think Broder is a tool who set out to jeopardize the test drive if he could. But at the same time I can't fault him for sensationalizing the problem with charge times and charge rates. That's a huge difference between EVs and ICE vehicles, and it needs to be stressed over and over to the public until it becomes "common sense" that you can't just fill 'er up in 5 minutes like you can with gasoline. The sooner everyone is made aware of that drawback, the sooner it will cease becoming a problem.
Because it's an electric car. It's not like a gasoline car where filling the tank takes twice as much time as filling half a tank. The charge you get doesn't ramp up linearly with time. It starts off charging quickly, then slows down. If you charge it up to max, you're going to be sitting at the charging station for several hours. The quickest way to get from one place to another (minimizing charge times) is to use about a 50% quick-charge at each stop (supposed to take a half hour).
If you look at the logs Tesla posted, you can see that's exactly what he did. The two interim supercharges gave him approx 200 and 150 miles in range. The controversial Norwich charge was not a supercharge station, so he would've been there overnight if he'd charged to full there. He did the prudent thing - take on only as much charge as needed to get to the next supercharge station. Except according to him, Tesla employees told him he could get there with a smaller charge than the mileage meter showed was needed. According to Musk, his employees told him no such thing.
The speed is something he can't tell the truth about. Everybody drives faster than the speed limit. Everybody. But you can't admit to breaking the law in a national newspaper. So you just write that you were going below 55 mph (speed limit in New York IIRC) and following the flow of traffic, and most readers understand that you were going 65-75. The logs Tesla posted show he was driving above the speed limit like everyone does, so he needed some CYA to avoid admitting to a traffic violation.
Most car reviews sidestep this problem by testing on a closed private track. Or not mentioning speeds.
Please read the UDRP. The amount of money and time you put into building the website is irrelevant and non-recoupable. All you can legitimately ask the trademark holder for is your costs to acquire and administrative costs directly related to maintaining the domain. If you're upset that you'd be losing all the work you put into building up the site and the mailing lists, well then you shouldn't have built it on a domain name which clearly infringes someone else's trademark.
The fact that there's nothing malicious, untruthful, nor libelous on the site is irrelevant. The standard used is whether the site name and content could be confused as belonging to or being endorsed by the trademark holder. You're judging Ron Paul using your own made-up imaginary rules which don't even match the actual rules. I think it's a dick move by Ron Paul against people who clearly are (or were) his supporters. But the rules you're using to evaluate it carry no legal weight.
I was under the impression ronpaul.com was a volunteer effort. But if you're correct that it's commercial (the site owners are making money off of it), then that's two strikes against them - commercial use of a domain matching someone else's trademark, and asking the trademark holder $250,000 for it. ICANN is virtually guaranteed to take the domain away from them. Anybody who owns a domain needs to read the UDRP so they know exactly how tenuous their "ownership" of the domain really is.
That's a violation of ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. Offering to sell a domain matching a trademark to the trademark holder is evidence of bad faith registration (section 4b(i)), and grounds for awarding the domain to the trademark holder. If Ron Paul had offered to buy it and stated an amount, they would have been fine. If they'd told him to piss off and given him the finger they would've been fine. But they really screwed the pooch by stating on their own that they'd sell it to him for $250,000. There's a good chance they're going to lose the domain to him.
Remember this if you own a domain that someone else wants to buy. Never ask for an amount. Even if they say they're interested in buying and how much would you want for it, don't state an amount. Let them come to you with an amount first, then you can negotiate. If you're the first one to state the amount, they can nail you with section 4b(i). The guy who owns nissan.com (he sells computers and Nissan is his last name) almost lost it because Nissan (the car company) kept bugging him to sell. And out of exasperation one day he told them (in Dr. Evil fashion), "$1 million dollars. How many times do I have to tell you, I'm not going to sell it."
Contrary to all the knee-jerk criticism heaped upon him by anti-liberterians who've probably never heard of ICANN or the UDNDRP, Ron Paul is doing the right thing here - working within the rules of ICANN to get the dispute resolved.
You have to understand how all this started. During the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, there were widespread food shortages. The government vowed never again, and began subsidizing food production to insure there was always an oversupply. Mostly corn. The government agrees to buy corn at a fixed price if the market price drops below a certain floor. So corn farmers overproduce. If there's a cold snap or a pest-related crop failure, we have a bigger buffer before we begin suffering food shortages.
So each year we produce more corn than we can consume. What do you do with all that extra corn? Some of it gets shipped off as humanitarian foreign aid. A lot of it gets used as feed for livestock. In the mid-1900s someone figured out how to convert it into high fructose corn syrup as a substitute for cane sugar. And in the 1970s right after the Arab oil embargo, someone got the bright idea, "why don't we convert it into fuel for cars?"
It makes sense as long as you're dealing with excess corn. Its corn which would otherwise grow moldy in silos. So the fact that it's energy intensive doesn't really matter. It's a sunk cost. We've already paid for it; the only question is how much use can we get out of it. So in that respect, the corn ethanol program - or anything for that matter - makes more sense than letting it rot in silos.
But all that goes out the window the moment you start growing corn specifically to convert into ethanol. Then it's no longer excess corn, it hasn't already been paid for, and the economics of it fall apart and make no sense unless you're a lobbyist and politician in Washington.
Historically, the AUD has been worth about 0.75 USD (click on 10 year). It wasn't until the global financial meltdown that the AUD shot up in value to where it surpassed parity with the USD (Australia's economy wasn't hurt as much because they didn't have a housing bubble at the time, though they have one now). If you compare before and after, the AUD increased in value by about 40% against the USD. If you compare the software prices, they too are about 40% higher. Surprise, surprise.
When companies conduct business internationally, they usually negotiate a fixed exchange rate for a year (or a quarter). It helps insulate their annual financial planning from fluctuations in the currency markets. So when the AUD first shot up, the vendors importing US software still had to pay 1.3 AUD per 1.0 USD, even though 1.3 AUD was now worth closer to 1.4 USD. The next year when they went to negotiate currency exchange prices again, the US companies said "OMG! You want a 40% price cut? You can't be serious!" And the Australian vendors didn't have purchasing power to negotiate a better deal. So year after year they got shafted with prices based on pre-2007 exchange rates. (In the US companies' defense, they probably argued that if the AUD shot up 40% in a year, it could drop 40% the next year, and they weren't willing to take that big a risk and adjust the exchange rate by that large an amount. But it's unconscionable that it's continued for 5 years.)
So if you think a police officer, politician, or someone working at the government is breaking any law - Canadian, provincial, or foreign, you can break into their network and computers and install your rootkit and keylogger. Hackers and groups like Anonymous would simply have to claim "we broken into the system because we suspected the owner was violating Moldavian law" or something like that, and they'd be in the clear.
A previous company I worked at helped create 1278.1 (DIS). And you're correct that it's able to handle massive numbers of simulated entities interacting (easily tens of thousands; I think they managed one sim with over 100,000 entities in the mid-1990s). The crucial difference from the simulated shared environment most of us are familiar with (online games) is that the participants don't cheat. Hacking your client so it doesn't operate as programmed defeats the purpose of running a sim. Whereas in a game it's frequently in the player's best interest to cheat by hacking their client.
So in an online game, all the position, movement, actions, and collisions have to be handled by a centralized server to make it impossible to cheat. With DIS, each client calculates its own interactions and simply multicasts the consequences (e.g. movement changes) to all the other sim participants. e.g. The F-16 sim tells everyone it drops a bomb from its location with this trajectory. The M1A2 tank sim uses that to calculate that it was hit and destroyed, and it tells everyone "I'm dead now."
Since all these calculations are distributed, your computing power scales with the number of participants, unlike an online game where the server computing power is fixed. And the primary limitation on scalability is how much traffic the network can handle (the spec calls for a very minimal packet size, and a lot of work went into decreasing the frequency with which an individual sim needed to multicast updates).
Normally I'd agree with the free market approach. But having visited Amsterdam, I can see why they wouldn't want to accommodate it. Pretty much the entire city can be traversed by walking/biking (there are a *lot* of bikes there). If they want to keep it that way and slow the growth of the city, then they want to maximize utilization of the buildings that are there.
Tourists rental apartments which sit empty half the time waste space, and drive up prices for residents by adding tourists to the demand side of the equation. I can see the city's logic here. Divide the real estate economy into two separate groups - residents and tourists. Confine the tourists to hotels so the market prices for tourists' housing expenses are decoupled from the market prices for residents' housing expenses. That way as more or fewer tourists visit, the price for hotel rooms will rise or fall. But they won't affect the price of residential apartments in the city.
The market approach solves the higher housing prices by sprawling the city outward, expanding its size. Real estate on the periphery has (initially) lower prices, thus encouraging people to move outwards rather than stay in the center. But much of the charm of Amsterdam is in how accessible the entire city is by foot or bike, and the lack of skyscrapers. If the city wants to preserve that, then segregating tourist housing from residential housing makes sense.
The reason for this is pretty simple. In a market (in anything really), you have random noise. In a poorly functioning economy, the inefficiencies have a much larger impact on the economy that the noise. So it's easy for an economist to make accurate predictions.
When an economy develops, it does so by reducing or eliminating inefficiencies. In a well-developed economy like most Western economies, the inefficiencies are so small that their effect is usually swamped out by random noise. Random noise which turns most predictions into a coin toss.
Or for a non-economic analogy, the fact that Los Angeles now has clean air doesn't mean the air quality standards its implemented are now unnecessary. We're probably at the point where the number of dirty trucks randomly entering/leaving the city have a greater effect on the overall air quality than implementing or repealing different individual air quality regulations. But that doesn't mean the air quality regulations are useless and it's ok for us to just throw them all out.
Only if you want to give them the right to vote. No taxation without representation, right?
Most of this tax corporations vs tax individuals rhetoric is nonsense. In the end it doesn't matter which you tax - they both represent money that's diverted from the private sector into the public sector. If you shifted all individual taxes to corporations, that doesn't mean individuals would be able to buy more. It means the prices of the (corporation-produced) goods they buy would rise and exactly cancel out the extra income they'd take home from not being taxed.
Average real take-home pay scales with productivity per person, not whether you focus taxes on individuals or corporations.
Just go back to the old system. Banks cannot be investment brokerages. Investment brokerages cannot be banks. Then the only risk banks can take is in making loans. They shouldn't be trying to make money gambling in the stock market using depositors' money as their nest egg. They should be making money via interest they earn by making smart loans with depositors' money.
This is entirely your fault. The carriers that is. You complain about people wanting support without paying the toll. Yet you charge people the subsidized phone monthly service rate even though they have an off-contract phone. (T-Mobile is the only major carrier who doesn't - they'll cut your monthly fee $10-$20/mo once you're out of contract and paid off the "subsidy" for your phone purchase.)
You're the one who decoupled the relationship between "service" and "toll", and turned it into one amorphous "monthly service fee". You can't act like it's all fine when it favors you (off-contract phone owners paying subsidized service rates), then in the next breath complain about it when it doesn't favor you (non-data plan users asking for non-data support for their phone). You're currently charging them a toll for a subsidized phone, even though it's not a subsidized phone. Turnabout is fair play - give them the damn support.
Those being regulated by the state have a fundamental right to representation in that state. We fought a war over this a little over 200 years ago ("no taxation without representation"). That representation can be via voting or via some vehicle with which to voice their concerns to the state (i.e. lobbying). So for better or for worse, corporations must be a part of the political process. There's a tendency on slashdot to assume everything a corporation does is bad, which simply isn't true. If a corporation sees a legitimate issue with a proposed law, there must be some way for them to voice it. Otherwise you'll end up with a bunch of bad laws.
What needs to happen is to remind politicians that they are ultimately accountable to the voters. They work for the public, so all meetings with lobbyists should legally be required to be videotaped and made available to the public. Meeting with a lobbyist in private should be illegal.