There are industries and fields where "you get what you pay for". But eyeglasses is not one of them. The price is driven by fashion and by monopolistic practices.
Ask any engineer to estimate the COGS (cost of goods) for the eyeglasses on your head. It works out to just a few dollars. Yet I've been unable to convince many people that the $20 Zenni Optical glasses are just as good as the $600 Gucci glasses at the local optometrist.
My best argument is that you should go buy both and see for yourself. Try the $8 glasses from Zenni, leave extra pairs in your car, at your office, etc.
It is true that you have to understand your pupil distance measurement and your temple length measurements, but it's not any harder than buying shoes or clothes online.
The main thing to look at are the annual fees for the index fund. Real highway robbery is 1% or so. Standard Vanguard index funds should be less than 0.1%. For example, the "Vanguard 500 Index Fund ETF" is 0.04%. If you can get an equivalent through Robinhood at like 0.03%, that's good but the main thing is just to pay higher than.1% or so.
Looks like a car key; just don't let people see you point it at the TVs; they tend to get mad. But it's really useful in those places where obviously no on is watching the TV.
You can buy it pre-made or as a kit, or even make your own from some simple electronics.
I found one interesting thing about the Mars trilogy was that he tried to make some concession to not keeping in Western-centric.
USA sci-fi is imagined through the lens of our current Western society, and whole large parts of the world work very differently. It will probably be the Chinese running the Mars colony, with Chinese-based customs.
Neal Stephenson had this as a plot point in his book REAMDE. An MMORPG had a mini-game where you had to recognize some objects, but actually they were being fed TSA machine images from the airports, looking for dangerous objects in luggage.
Most of the towns in the South Bay have ordinances with prohibitions against motorhomes. You can't live in them, you can't park them on their streets or in driveways. And they certainly don't allow businesses to allow motorhomes to live in their parking lots. So it all has to be on the downlow, it has to look like a regular van and no one has to notice you.
"And if *all* the cars on the road aren't autonomous, then the autonomous ones are mostly a traffic hazard with no clear liability."
There's something missing from your logic leap there. It's more like "And if *all* the cars on the road aren't autonomous, then the autonomous ones are still the cars most likely to react correctly to any hazardous situation."
Well, sure, but infrastructure is really expensive. Building your infrastructure to handle the peak loads and then to sit idle the rest of the time is less efficient than handling the peak load some other way. You're saying peak pricing is expensive because infrastructure is expensive.
Well, if only we had some authentication scheme that only required you to authenticate once, and then grant you a token that expired after a certain time, and then you could use that token to authenticate to everything...
And here you see the primary use to which print newspapers are put today. All the dog owners and other pet owners use it to collect their pets' bowel movements.
The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson addresses this issue a bit (along with all the other issues).
In those books, the colonists (numbering 100 for the initial batch) are split on whether "contamination" of Mars is acceptable or not. Eventually, a group splinters off, much like the staunch environmentalists we have in the US today.
Back when I worked for a web host company, we occasionally (rarely) had some issues where customers got screwed. In the worst case, your VPS is on a box where multiple disks die in a RAID array, and you don't have backups, and that's that.
We were customer-friendly, so we would refund the customer's hosting charges if something went terribly wrong. But if you're paying $19/month, you can't really expect us to refund you more than $19/mo when something goes wrong.
There's a rule of thumb in physical security; you should spend ~5% of the value of the thing to secure the thing. E.g. ~$1000 bicycle means ~$50 bicycle lock. If you're using a $19/mo service to hold $10k worth of value, you better be taking some other precautions. These guys were doing the equivalent of keeping $10k in cash in a $20 lockbox in a public place.
You're right, higher resolution (ppi) means that text can still be legible at a slightly smaller size. But that also means that the high ppi is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for the people that also want large font size, so they can have the same exact experience as reading a piece of paper.
Slashdot Mirror
There are industries and fields where "you get what you pay for". But eyeglasses is not one of them. The price is driven by fashion and by monopolistic practices.
Ask any engineer to estimate the COGS (cost of goods) for the eyeglasses on your head. It works out to just a few dollars. Yet I've been unable to convince many people that the $20 Zenni Optical glasses are just as good as the $600 Gucci glasses at the local optometrist.
My best argument is that you should go buy both and see for yourself. Try the $8 glasses from Zenni, leave extra pairs in your car, at your office, etc.
It is true that you have to understand your pupil distance measurement and your temple length measurements, but it's not any harder than buying shoes or clothes online.
An article about what Fei Fei Li has been up to for a few years: Stanford, Google, etc. And the things she is now worried about. Here is the link: https://www.wired.com/story/fei-fei-li-artificial-intelligence-humanity/
There are also many non-university courses available online.
One example is this excellent free introductory data science course which can be done entirely in your browser. "Chromebook Data Science": https://leanpub.com/universities/set/jhu/chromebook-data-science
The main thing to look at are the annual fees for the index fund. Real highway robbery is 1% or so. Standard Vanguard index funds should be less than 0.1%. For example, the "Vanguard 500 Index Fund ETF" is 0.04%. If you can get an equivalent through Robinhood at like 0.03%, that's good but the main thing is just to pay higher than .1% or so.
Looks like a car key; just don't let people see you point it at the TVs; they tend to get mad. But it's really useful in those places where obviously no on is watching the TV.
You can buy it pre-made or as a kit, or even make your own from some simple electronics.
https://www.tvbgone.com/
Have you considered reading the paper?
I found one interesting thing about the Mars trilogy was that he tried to make some concession to not keeping in Western-centric.
USA sci-fi is imagined through the lens of our current Western society, and whole large parts of the world work very differently. It will probably be the Chinese running the Mars colony, with Chinese-based customs.
The real question is, are they more or less skeptical about driverless cars or cars controlled by other drivers?
I know which one I want following me on the highway: the driverless car, not the texting tailgating person who is late and frustrated.
Oops, I'm wrong, 4 ever: http://electrek.co/2015/12/22/man-dies-tesla-model-s-crash-dump-truck-first-death/
"anyone killed in a Tesla will somehow be national news."
It would be! 0 people have died in a Tesla so far!
I guess we need to make sure everyone is armed and ready to fire at all times in the whole country. That way we'll have fewer shootings.
Going to the gym? Wear an ankle holster. Going to Starbucks? Pack your trusty 12-gauge. /sarcasm
Neal Stephenson had this as a plot point in his book REAMDE. An MMORPG had a mini-game where you had to recognize some objects, but actually they were being fed TSA machine images from the airports, looking for dangerous objects in luggage.
Most of the towns in the South Bay have ordinances with prohibitions against motorhomes. You can't live in them, you can't park them on their streets or in driveways. And they certainly don't allow businesses to allow motorhomes to live in their parking lots. So it all has to be on the downlow, it has to look like a regular van and no one has to notice you.
Or we could all just drive a Fiat Multipla and avoid those pesky vertical A-pillars to begin with.
screen -x shares the screen just fine for me.
"And if *all* the cars on the road aren't autonomous, then the autonomous ones are mostly a traffic hazard with no clear liability."
There's something missing from your logic leap there. It's more like "And if *all* the cars on the road aren't autonomous, then the autonomous ones are still the cars most likely to react correctly to any hazardous situation."
"garage fire started by improperly installed electrical outlet" just doesn't get you as many clicks.
The garage fire was Nov 15, the Tesla S did not sustain any damage. The damage was all on the wall socket side.
Well, sure, but infrastructure is really expensive. Building your infrastructure to handle the peak loads and then to sit idle the rest of the time is less efficient than handling the peak load some other way. You're saying peak pricing is expensive because infrastructure is expensive.
Well, if only we had some authentication scheme that only required you to authenticate once, and then grant you a token that expired after a certain time, and then you could use that token to authenticate to everything...
http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/dialogue.html
And here you see the primary use to which print newspapers are put today. All the dog owners and other pet owners use it to collect their pets' bowel movements.
The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson addresses this issue a bit (along with all the other issues).
In those books, the colonists (numbering 100 for the initial batch) are split on whether "contamination" of Mars is acceptable or not. Eventually, a group splinters off, much like the staunch environmentalists we have in the US today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
Back when I worked for a web host company, we occasionally (rarely) had some issues where customers got screwed. In the worst case, your VPS is on a box where multiple disks die in a RAID array, and you don't have backups, and that's that.
We were customer-friendly, so we would refund the customer's hosting charges if something went terribly wrong. But if you're paying $19/month, you can't really expect us to refund you more than $19/mo when something goes wrong.
There's a rule of thumb in physical security; you should spend ~5% of the value of the thing to secure the thing. E.g. ~$1000 bicycle means ~$50 bicycle lock. If you're using a $19/mo service to hold $10k worth of value, you better be taking some other precautions. These guys were doing the equivalent of keeping $10k in cash in a $20 lockbox in a public place.
You're right, higher resolution (ppi) means that text can still be legible at a slightly smaller size. But that also means that the high ppi is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for the people that also want large font size, so they can have the same exact experience as reading a piece of paper.
Wikipedia page about "Underground"
Download page for "Underground"
I read it on my Kindle.
You can get a SuperMicro reseller to sell you one workstation with 4 sockets of CPUs and a bunch of RAM. UK£ 4000 = 6 299.2 U.S. dollars
That buys you a box with 4 x Opteron 6134 (32 cores) and 128GB RAM (32 x 4GB sticks). And some hard disks.