I am amused by the continued anti-Uber diatribes. Uber doesn't "take over" by lobbying, or by defrauding their customers. Uber succeeds by providing a far superior, less expensive, more convenient transportation service than existing taxi companies.
I've had enough horrible cab rides in enough cities to have zero sympathy for traditional taxi services. I will take Uber or Lyft over a regular cab any day of the week. I have never had an experience with either one of those services that could hold a candle to some of the nightmare stories I could tell you about cab rides. All my friends are in complete agreement. Everyone I personally know who has tried Uber loves it.
When the politicians love Uber too (and they certainly do in Washington D.C.), then you know that cab services are on the wrong end of history. All the blather about how taxi companies are superior because they are vetted and regulated by the government is laughable. Taxi companies can and do sidestep or ignore those regulations. Despite the supposed criminal background checks, some cab drivers do rape, assault, and rob their customers. (Just Google 'cab driver rape' and read the stories.)
At least with Uber I know I'll be in a clean vehicle with a driver whose name and face are shown to me before I get in, and who will take me to my destination without trying to cheat me because I'm from out of town. I'll have a fairly accurate estimate of the price before I get in the cab. And best of all, if something goes wrong, Uber will actually have a record of my trip, the name of the driver, the vehicle I'm in, etc. "Lack of privacy" is not something that bothers me when I'm using a service like this.
Magnetic levitation is certainly feasible, but it is almost certainly economically impractical.
For example, Ken Pence at Vanderbilt University has built a prototype magnetic levitation platform that uses spinning NdFeB magnets. I've seen it in action. It requires an aluminum sheet underneath the platform, and uses about 20 kW of power to lift a maximum of 300 pounds. Prof. Pence's ultimate goal is to make it steerable and have a demo with students driving it around a room.
However, Prof. Pence will cheerfully admit that the technology is far from practical for consumer use. You'd need to install aluminum sheeting under every roadway, and the power requirements for the amount of load being lifted are excessive. 20 kW is enough to push an electric car down the road at 60 mph. He will jokingly admit that his magnetic platform would only do 60 mph if you drove it off a cliff.
So why build it? His students constructed it as part of a Management of Technology course, where they learn firsthand the practical limitations of building a "gee whiz" device. I've seen some pretty interesting gadgets come out of that class (e.g. a wireless power transmitter), but as his students figure out, just because something is possible doesn't make it the least bit practical.
Not sure where you're coming from on this; how? Do you think the automated cars are going to be free/cheaper than existing taxi cabs and public transit?
A rent-on-demand autonomous car would absolutely compete with existing taxi cabs. Have you paid for a twenty-mile cab ride lately? On top of that, you wouldn't have to worry about being cheated a dishonest cab driver (particularly a problem with elderly passengers).
Cheaper than public transit? No, but certainly much safer than the public transit in most cities, and far more convenient (e.g. door-to-door service without forcing elderly people to walk several blocks to the nearest bus stop and wait 15 to 30 minutes for the next bus).
The world isn't going to rush out and buy self-driving cars just because the people who want to sell self-driving cars tell us how awesome they'll be. It just doesn't work that way.
Thirty years ago, you could just as easily have written the following:
"The world isn't going to rush out and buy cellular phones just because the people who want to sell cellular phones tell us how awesome they'll be. It just doesn't work that way."
Back then, Ma Bell ran the U.S. telecom industry. Nearly every home had a landline, with regulated rates. Public phones were everywhere. What possible motivation could people have to buy a $400 smartphone every two years, and pay $50 or $100 a month in connection fees on top of that? Yet here we are today.
Self-driving cars aren't going to overturn transportation because they're "awesome", but because they'll be so damned useful to so many people, not the least of which will be the large segment of the population that wants the convenience of personal transportation, but cannot drive.
Add to that the estimated 250 billion USD cost each year in the U.S. alone due to auto accidents, along with 35,000 deaths and millions of injuries (some permanently disabling), and there is in fact an enormous financial (and humanitarian) incentive to get self-driving cars on the road ASAP.
Twenty years from now we'll be looking back and wondering how we ever managed without autonomous transportation, just as we now wonder how we managed before the cell / smartphone era. People can kick and scream about the future all they want, but it's coming nonetheless.
However, every now and again, I would receive a "text of death". The phone would receive a text message, crash, reboot, attempt to download text messages again, crash.... etc.. It continued to do this until the network would decide to give up attempting to send that MMS message.
I've got a better story than that. Back in the mid-80's, when I was working at IBM, we did almost all of our programming in REXX and APL2 using dumb terminals.
One of the features of the system was the ability to send a message to another user that would appear directly on his or her screen like a text message.
By accident, one of the guys in my group discovered that by sending a certain string of characters to another user, he could force the receipt's terminal to automatically log off. Predictably, this led to a campaign of various people sending the "message of death" to each other, hearing the recipient yell and curse, and then quickly closing any open file before the victim fired back with a message of his own. This went on for about two weeks before we all got tired of it.
And of course I could also talk about the REXX worm that shut down the entire IBM internal email system for more than a day, but that is another story.:-)
More than a century of research establishes that monitoring workers actually reduces the ability to perform complex tasks, such as operating a train, because of the distractive effect.
Of course, the same observation could be made about monitoring police officers, day care workers, teachers, etc., but that hasn't stopped the demands to put them under video surveillance, has it?
Train engineers are federal employees, and the lives of hundreds are in their hands. Now it's their turn to be watched.
Three skills that will be invaluable to any HS student later in life:
(1) Good writing, i.e. being able to write well enough to communicate ideas effectively and convincingly (requires a lot of recreational reading, by the way, which doesn't seem particularly popular among the younger generation nowadays).
(2) Being able to stand up in front of an audience and give a good presentation.
(3) Knowing how to touch type.
Invaluable at age 18, and equally invaluable at age 68, no matter what direction your career leads you in.
In a nutshell, this shows one reason why the iPhone (and iOS) are so popular.
I have an iPhone and I'm happy with it, but if Apple disappeared tomorrow, I could easily move to the Android ecosystem. The differences in usability between iOS and Android aren't that compelling.
But one thing I absolutely refuse to do is buy a phone where the manufacturer washes its hands of it, and forces me to either root the phone, or deal with the carrier to get updates. No. I'm done with that. I learned my lesson back when I owned Palm OS phones, and I'm not going back again.
Android fragmentation exists because manufacturers refuse to maintain their phones. Pushing that job onto the carriers is a recipe for customer dissatisfaction and security breaches. If Google wants to solve this problem, they need to force the manufacturers to accept responsibility for updating their own hardware.
This Wednesday, however, the bill passed that committee after its authors tweaked it, adding amendments that would expand the definition of home schooling to allow multiple families to join together to teach their children or participate in independent study programs run by public school systems.
I hate to say it, but maybe this is for the best. Unfortunately, what may be needed to kill the anti-vaxxer mindset once and for all is for a whole classroom of unvaccinated children to come down with measles or polio or smallpox or whooping cough, and for several of them to die.
Horrible? Yes, but the parents who have bought into this insanity are endangering everyone, not just their own children. Some of these people are quite literally proclaiming that vaccines have never worked, and that it is only improvements in hygiene that have resulted in the elimination of most deadly childhood diseases. A good cold dash of reality is the only cure. It is just a damned shame that some innocent kids will have to pay the price.
It does seem like a big deal. I mean, last year there nominations titled "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love", which was an unusual choice for both a Nebula (a different SF/F award, chosen by a jury) and a Hugo nomination. The genre is floundering fairly hard.
How about the actual Hugo short story winner, "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere"? John Chu may be a talented writer, but that story was NOT a science fiction story. It was a cliched story about a guy bringing home a partner that his family didn't approve of, with a silly "you get wet when you lie" bit tossed in at the beginning to somehow qualify it for the Hugo with a mild fantasy element.
It was another "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" plot retread, only this time the "Who" was gay. So what? It was still a story we've all heard or seen a hundred times in the past 30 years - just substitute your race / religion / ethnicity of choice. What makes this one memorable, besides the sexuality of the main characters?
I cannot believe there wasn't a better science fiction short story published in 2013 than Chu's story. It's not the genre that's floundering, it's what the people who are running the Hugo consider to be "worthy" that has plummeted.
The trolly-switch dilemma that people keep bringing up is so ridiculously contrived that I just don't see it having a bearing on the reality of day to day driving and safety of the vehicle for a couple of reasons.
Not to mention that these silly trolley-switch arguments completely sidestep the bigger ethical question: If switching to an all-autonomous fleet results in traffic fatalities being cut by an order of magnitude (3,000 vs. 30,000 per year), isn't it unethical not to switch to SDCs as soon as possible?
Autonomous cars may not be perfect, but they will almost certainly be a damned sight better than 99.9% of all drivers out there today. We kill 30,000 people a year in the U.S. alone, maim another 2 million, and somehow that's acceptable because a human being was behind the wheel? That's what makes the whole "what if the car kills my child instead of yours" argument so laughable. Hey, how about we stop killing a lot less of everyone's kids? How's that for a solution?
SDCs are coming, and the knee-jerk reaction of "You'll pry my steering wheel out of my cold dead hands" is entirely predictable. No doubt people were making similar arguments about keeping their horses a hundred years ago. And here's why SDCs are inevitable: once the technology exists, and young people start using it, they will see no point in having a driver's license or learning how to drive. Then, as the older generation ages to the point where their eyesight and reflexes fail, they will be demanding SDCs, with the AARP pushing for their adoption. In a generation, manual automobiles will be curiosities owned by collectors.
But, honestly, trying to gate crash an Army base and then getting into a shooting match with the guards... well, that's a special kind of stupid.
Having visited the NSA facility myself many years ago, it is incredibly stupid. The military guards at the NSA are extremely alert, extremely competent, and very well armed. They will not hesitate to point a gun in your direction, or open fire if you fail to immediately comply with their orders.
They are not your typical security guards or your typical police. They are a level above that, and you do not want to mess with them.
Well, this is why you should keep your own bitcoin wallet. Bitcoin theft isn't a problem with bitcoin itself. It's a problem with where you're keeping your bitcoins.
No, BTC theft is indeed a problem with BTC itself. Evolution operated a BTC escrow service between its buyers and sellers. Unless the buyer and seller trust each other implicitly, escrow is essential for large remote transactions to ensure that no one gets ripped off, because (as we all know) BTC transactions are irreversible.
What Evolution did was empty out its escrow accounts and run off with the BTC from all the pending transactions. There is now essentially zero likelihood of them being punished, or the BTC being recovered.
And there you have the problem with BTC in a nutshell. Whether you use an exchange to transfer BTC to fiat, or use an escrow service to hold it pending a transaction, who do you trust to do the job? Particularly in an unregulated, pseudo-anonymous economic model where theft and graft go unpunished on a regular basis?
BTC has jumped the shark and is now moving into the long-term "let's keep fleecing the newbies" phase, just as you see with gold and silver "investment" companies. As long as there are suckers willing to exchange good money for BTC, there will be a very long line of criminals ready and willing to take it from them.
Now all the Winklevoss twins need to do is find is a reason for the average American consumer to buy BTC and use them, instead of using credit cards and debit cards that are protected from fraud and loss by federal law. Bitcoin may be a great deal for businesses, but it is a terrible deal for consumers, and without people on both sides of the economic equation it is slowly dying (witness the long slow decline in price, and the fact that a few hundred thousand people at most possess all the BTC in circulation).
That's the crux of the problem, and the one that no one has figured out yet, beyond yelling "Those evil bankers and politicians are robbing you with fiat money!" Right, so I'll pay my percentage to the twins, instead of my local bank? That's like choosing to be eaten by jackals instead of wolves.
Speaking of those who hold bitcoins I heard on NPR this morning that there are only about 250,000 people in the world who hold bitcoins. That's not enough people for me to take it seriously.
Bitcoin proponents may disagree with that number, but for the sake of argument let's assume that 10X as many people (2.5 million) hold BTC. That would mean 0.0357% of the world's population holds about 13.7 million BTC (all that have been mined so far). Since only 21 million BTC can ever be mined, then those 0.0357% possess 65.2% of all the BTC that ever will exist. With those numbers, the speculative hoarding frenzy surrounding Bitcoin is easy to understand.
Given also that many Bitcoin "believers" preach that BTC will one day become the dominant world currency, then what we have is a potential wealth gap that makes the wealth gap in the U.S. look positively socialist in comparison.
That, to me, is what makes Bitcoin so downright bizarre. A bunch of people have convinced themselves that all fiat currencies will collapse one day, making them rich beyond the dreams of avarice, since no one will think of using any cryptocurrency except BTC, because... well, just because. And then they will own the world.
Bit Coins are actually more real then the US Dollar. Sure we get a paper or coin note stating that this represents so much. But at least bit coin is connected to something in limited supply thus needs to be shared.
I've never understood the logic behind statements like this. There are an infinite possible number of cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency is nothing but a mathematical algorithm being run on a lot of computers. By its very nature, it can't be in limited supply. Saying that Bitcoin is valuable because it's scare is like saying that digital music or digital video must be valuable because they're scarce.
Any one, at any time, can create his own blockchain and create a Bitcoin clone. After that, all he need to do is persuade other people to adopt his blockchain, and a new standard has been created, with the originator becoming "wealthy". In fact, I suspect that this idea may suddenly occur to the operators of one of the big idled mining centers over the next few months.
And before anyone says, "But Bitcoin was first!", let me reply, "Friendster and MySpace".
Slashdot basically killed that company outright with nothing more than the argument that the technology was impossible. Search the thread for my screen name and watch me get shouted down for suggesting it actually is possible and even provide links to ICs you could use.
And now here we have a story that's touting it as a legitimate device?
I've no idea if iFind was actually a scam or not. They clearly went bust just days after the Slashdot story. But this kind of smacks of hypocrisy. Why was that a scam and this is not?
If you had actually bothered to watch the video, or read the transcript, you'd know that EnOcean is not using RF harvesting to power any of their devices. They are using mechanical, solar, and thermoelectric energy harvesting techniques to power ultra-low power sensors, and to generate RF signals to control other powered appliances (e.g. desk lamps). They are using clever engineering, but they are not making any claims that violate the laws of physics.
iFind was a scam. There was no way that a device that size could harvest, store, and utilize RF energy at the levels claimed by them. Not to mention that the so-called "inventor", supposedly with multiple advanced degrees in engineering and medicine, had absolutely no presence or history on the web.
And Slashdot didn't "kill" iFind. Kickstarter killed it, after performing a little due diligence and realizing that something was fishy with WeTag. But if Slashdot helped pushed Kickstarter into checking into the background of WeTag's principals, then so much the better.
Energy harvesting from ambient RF does work, but to capture significant amounts of energy requires lots of area (e.g. an antenna or large pickup coil), or to have RF energy beamed directly at the device. At no time does EnOcean claim to be using RF harvesting to power their devices; they are only using ultra-low power RF radio bursts for short-range communication.
You are not liable, any more liable than you are with cash, getting your bitcoin back will be at least as difficult as getting your cash back would be. You will have to file some kind civil claim and convince a judge or possibly jury the other party did not honor their part the transaction contract and you require some kind of redress.
Which, of course, is why people carry credit cards, because it lets them dispute the charge without going to the effort of filing a lawsuit to get redress.
Well yea, that is the trade off, I could easily carry a USB stick or whatever with the equivalent value of $250K in btc and go buy a house or something. Its inconvenient to walk around with that much cash. Still sever minutes is much faster than the several days a check would require to clear.
It's inconvenient and dangerous to walk around with that much cash, which is why we have a banking system. My bank electronically transfers the money to the seller's bank after I sign the paperwork, in the presence of an attorney and licensed agents. It gives me peace of mind, it prevents me from being ripped off, and once I sign, I walk out of the office and I'm done. So exactly what advantage does BTC provide to such a transaction, when it's exactly like carrying a big bundle of cash?
And I won't even get into the insanity of taking out a home loan in a deflationary economy. You really think that everyone is going to pay for homes and cars in full, without loans?
You'd better get used to it. Between the changes with chip-and-pin and ideas like CurrentC, the powers that be are pretty determined to strip those protections away from you anyway.
No one is going to force me to use CurrentC, and chip-and-PIN is intended to reduce credit card fraud, not make me to eat any loss if my account is compromised. On the other hand, I know that a BTC transaction would absolutely force me to eat the loss, because that's exactly how the system is designed to behave.
You're just dancing around the inconvenient fact that consumers have no incentive to use BTC over credit cards. It's a market for speculators and early adopters who are fervently hoping that someone else will buy their BTC and pump up the price, but no rational consumer (at least in the U.S. or Europe) has any incentive to do so.
The entire notion of bitcoin has always seemed a little sketchy to me.
Not just sketchy, but pointless (at least to the average consumer).
What sane person would use a debit card that mandates irreversible transactions if you are cheated by a merchant, makes you liable for all fraudulent use of the card, and takes several minutes for a purchase to be validated? Because that's basically what Bitcoin is. It's like stepping 50 years into the past, into a world without consumer protection laws.
If you were an early adopter of BTC, obviously you have a huge incentive to push for wider adoption, as this lets you turn your CPU-mined BTC into free money. But if you are someone who has never touched BTC in your life, you have no incentive to buy them now, and none to use them. It doesn't matter how many merchants accept BTC, because the average shopper would be insane to use them.
Regardless of what happens to the exchanges, BTC has hit a brick wall in adoption. Read about the experiences of merchants in Florida who signed up to accept BTC prior to the Bitcoin Bowl. Several of them stopped accepting BTC when it became apparent that no one was spending them.
The two new ads promote Bitcoin and BitPay as a secure alternative to traditional credit-card transactions.
Yes, BTC is exactly that for a business, but exactly what incentive does a consumer have to use it?
Right now, if I want to buy something with U.S. dollars, I pull out my credit card or my cell phone, and I buy it. The transaction is completed in a matter of seconds (no waiting for verification via a blockchain), and if I use Apple Pay or Google Wallet, it is extremely secure.
On top of that, if I am cheated by the merchant, I can contact the credit card company and dispute the charges. Furthermore, even if my credit card is somehow compromised, I am only liable for $50 maximum by law, without having to go to court or sue anyone.
What does BTC do for me? First, I have to buy BTC, and then spend it quickly before the value changes. Second, if the merchant cheats me, too bad. BTC gives him all the power - transactions are irreversible. Third, if my BTC wallet is compromised, I can kiss my BTC goodbye. All of the consumer protections that I enjoy with credit cards are gone. So exactly what do I get out of the deal?
For the average consumer, Bitcoin is a solution in search of a problem. BTC may be a great way to buy contraband, or to send money to someone in a 3rd world country, but that is hardly something the average person bothers with on a regular basis.
Bitcoin is a niche product, and will remain so, despite every effort by BTC evangelists to persuade consumers to give them real money in exchange for their cryptocoins. Someone give me a reason to use BTC on a regular basis that doesn't involve some idealistic "screw the establishment, fiat currency is evil" rationalization. As a consumer, I don't see the point.
The same thing my generation did: ignore the self-styled "experts" who tell you you're doing it all wrong, and trust your own best judgment instead.
The world is chock full of wonderful theories about child-rearing and education that might provide better outcomes if we all had infinite time, infinite patience, and infinite resources to try them out. But we don't, so we do the best we can with what we have. That is particularly true when you are a parent of a young child.
This reminds me of the current fuss over "flipped classrooms". Yes, it seems like an interesting idea, and it might provide better outcomes, but it requires several outstanding teaching assistants who understand the concepts well enough to provide one-on-one instruction during class time.
In the real world most of my teaching assistants don't understand the material any better than my students. So unless my employer can figure out how to clone me, I'm going to stick with what works, rather than lose sleep over what is impractical to even attempt.
Everyone that says they have a box that makes energy from nothing, I say, phase match your box to the line current from the local utility, roll your meter backwards, and cash the ensuing checks. Then talk to me.
This, a thousand times over. Having a "free energy" machine, if it existed, would be like owning a machine that printed money.
Rossi claims he has constructed 1 MW reactors. Assuming this was true, and assuming Rossi could sell that power for just $0.10 USD per kW-hr, then he has a machine that effectively generates income at the rate of $100 / hour. Use half of that income for operating costs and personal expenses, and Rossi makes a net profit of $36,000 a month if the machine runs 24/7.
In a year Rossi has $432,000. Long before then, he would be able to build a second generator, doubling his income. Assuming one generator could "double" itself every six months, in five years he has a profit of $18.4M USD each month. In less than a decade, he is the wealthiest man on the planet.
So why isn't Rossi doing that, instead of trying to get investors to write checks? Because he can't, of course. Like all frauds and pseudoscientists, he is utterly incapable of actually doing anything useful with his so-called "invention".
Bonkers like Newegg, and Dish Network? Both of which accept bit coin.
No, they accept USD, or whatever fiat currency they specify, with a transaction processor like Bitpay converting BTC to fiat on the spot.
Lots of companies "accept" BTC that way, but they're really getting paid in some national currency. It is rather disingenuous of people to claim otherwise.
And yes, a company would be bonkers to accept, and keep, anything as volatile as BTC.
For example, if you want to disconnect. Comcast: Thanks for calling in... long nonsense fill speech later... How can I help you? You: I would like to disconnect my service effective immediately, if you waste my time and/or do anything other than disconnect me immediately, I will request a supervisor, I will accept nothing less than a supervisor, I will not allow you to put me on hold, and I will make this call miserable for the both of us until my service has been satisfactorily disconnected. *at this point 90% of agents will just do it and take the hit on their stats to not deal with you, but if they wont, read on* Comcast: I'm sorry to hear that sir, but I will have to transfer you to our disconnect department... You: *cut them off* Please get your supervisor, do not put me on hold. Thank you. Comcast: But my supervisor can't... You:You're wasting both of our time, call your supervisor over, I'd like to speak to them immediately. Inform them that if THEY can't disconnect my service, I'll be asking for their manager as well. This will continue until my service is disconnected, I will not be put on hold.
This is way too much effort, unless you happen to enjoy yanking some chains over the phone.
Here's how you quit Comcast:
(1) Disconnect every piece of Comcast equipment in your home. (2) Load it in a box, and put the box in your car. (3) Drive to the nearest Comcast customer center. (4) Dump the box on the counter and tell the rep: "I wish to terminate my service immediately."
No one will argue with you. You have completely bypassed Comcast's customer retention process by doing this. Pay the amount due on your bill, get a receipt with a complete list of the equipment you've turned in, then go home.
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I am amused by the continued anti-Uber diatribes. Uber doesn't "take over" by lobbying, or by defrauding their customers. Uber succeeds by providing a far superior, less expensive, more convenient transportation service than existing taxi companies.
I've had enough horrible cab rides in enough cities to have zero sympathy for traditional taxi services. I will take Uber or Lyft over a regular cab any day of the week. I have never had an experience with either one of those services that could hold a candle to some of the nightmare stories I could tell you about cab rides. All my friends are in complete agreement. Everyone I personally know who has tried Uber loves it.
When the politicians love Uber too (and they certainly do in Washington D.C.), then you know that cab services are on the wrong end of history. All the blather about how taxi companies are superior because they are vetted and regulated by the government is laughable. Taxi companies can and do sidestep or ignore those regulations. Despite the supposed criminal background checks, some cab drivers do rape, assault, and rob their customers. (Just Google 'cab driver rape' and read the stories.)
At least with Uber I know I'll be in a clean vehicle with a driver whose name and face are shown to me before I get in, and who will take me to my destination without trying to cheat me because I'm from out of town. I'll have a fairly accurate estimate of the price before I get in the cab. And best of all, if something goes wrong, Uber will actually have a record of my trip, the name of the driver, the vehicle I'm in, etc. "Lack of privacy" is not something that bothers me when I'm using a service like this.
Magnetic levitation is certainly feasible, but it is almost certainly economically impractical.
For example, Ken Pence at Vanderbilt University has built a prototype magnetic levitation platform that uses spinning NdFeB magnets. I've seen it in action. It requires an aluminum sheet underneath the platform, and uses about 20 kW of power to lift a maximum of 300 pounds. Prof. Pence's ultimate goal is to make it steerable and have a demo with students driving it around a room.
However, Prof. Pence will cheerfully admit that the technology is far from practical for consumer use. You'd need to install aluminum sheeting under every roadway, and the power requirements for the amount of load being lifted are excessive. 20 kW is enough to push an electric car down the road at 60 mph. He will jokingly admit that his magnetic platform would only do 60 mph if you drove it off a cliff.
So why build it? His students constructed it as part of a Management of Technology course, where they learn firsthand the practical limitations of building a "gee whiz" device. I've seen some pretty interesting gadgets come out of that class (e.g. a wireless power transmitter), but as his students figure out, just because something is possible doesn't make it the least bit practical.
A rent-on-demand autonomous car would absolutely compete with existing taxi cabs. Have you paid for a twenty-mile cab ride lately? On top of that, you wouldn't have to worry about being cheated a dishonest cab driver (particularly a problem with elderly passengers).
Cheaper than public transit? No, but certainly much safer than the public transit in most cities, and far more convenient (e.g. door-to-door service without forcing elderly people to walk several blocks to the nearest bus stop and wait 15 to 30 minutes for the next bus).
Thirty years ago, you could just as easily have written the following:
"The world isn't going to rush out and buy cellular phones just because the people who want to sell cellular phones tell us how awesome they'll be. It just doesn't work that way."
Back then, Ma Bell ran the U.S. telecom industry. Nearly every home had a landline, with regulated rates. Public phones were everywhere. What possible motivation could people have to buy a $400 smartphone every two years, and pay $50 or $100 a month in connection fees on top of that? Yet here we are today.
Self-driving cars aren't going to overturn transportation because they're "awesome", but because they'll be so damned useful to so many people, not the least of which will be the large segment of the population that wants the convenience of personal transportation, but cannot drive.
Add to that the estimated 250 billion USD cost each year in the U.S. alone due to auto accidents, along with 35,000 deaths and millions of injuries (some permanently disabling), and there is in fact an enormous financial (and humanitarian) incentive to get self-driving cars on the road ASAP.
Twenty years from now we'll be looking back and wondering how we ever managed without autonomous transportation, just as we now wonder how we managed before the cell / smartphone era. People can kick and scream about the future all they want, but it's coming nonetheless.
I've got a better story than that. Back in the mid-80's, when I was working at IBM, we did almost all of our programming in REXX and APL2 using dumb terminals.
One of the features of the system was the ability to send a message to another user that would appear directly on his or her screen like a text message.
By accident, one of the guys in my group discovered that by sending a certain string of characters to another user, he could force the receipt's terminal to automatically log off. Predictably, this led to a campaign of various people sending the "message of death" to each other, hearing the recipient yell and curse, and then quickly closing any open file before the victim fired back with a message of his own. This went on for about two weeks before we all got tired of it.
And of course I could also talk about the REXX worm that shut down the entire IBM internal email system for more than a day, but that is another story. :-)
Everything old is new again.
Of course, the same observation could be made about monitoring police officers, day care workers, teachers, etc., but that hasn't stopped the demands to put them under video surveillance, has it?
Train engineers are federal employees, and the lives of hundreds are in their hands. Now it's their turn to be watched.
Your dog loves you. But that cute girl down the street? She just wants to be friends.
Three skills that will be invaluable to any HS student later in life:
(1) Good writing, i.e. being able to write well enough to communicate ideas effectively and convincingly (requires a lot of recreational reading, by the way, which doesn't seem particularly popular among the younger generation nowadays).
(2) Being able to stand up in front of an audience and give a good presentation.
(3) Knowing how to touch type.
Invaluable at age 18, and equally invaluable at age 68, no matter what direction your career leads you in.
In a nutshell, this shows one reason why the iPhone (and iOS) are so popular.
I have an iPhone and I'm happy with it, but if Apple disappeared tomorrow, I could easily move to the Android ecosystem. The differences in usability between iOS and Android aren't that compelling.
But one thing I absolutely refuse to do is buy a phone where the manufacturer washes its hands of it, and forces me to either root the phone, or deal with the carrier to get updates. No. I'm done with that. I learned my lesson back when I owned Palm OS phones, and I'm not going back again.
Android fragmentation exists because manufacturers refuse to maintain their phones. Pushing that job onto the carriers is a recipe for customer dissatisfaction and security breaches. If Google wants to solve this problem, they need to force the manufacturers to accept responsibility for updating their own hardware.
I hate to say it, but maybe this is for the best. Unfortunately, what may be needed to kill the anti-vaxxer mindset once and for all is for a whole classroom of unvaccinated children to come down with measles or polio or smallpox or whooping cough, and for several of them to die.
Horrible? Yes, but the parents who have bought into this insanity are endangering everyone, not just their own children. Some of these people are quite literally proclaiming that vaccines have never worked, and that it is only improvements in hygiene that have resulted in the elimination of most deadly childhood diseases. A good cold dash of reality is the only cure. It is just a damned shame that some innocent kids will have to pay the price.
How about the actual Hugo short story winner, "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere"? John Chu may be a talented writer, but that story was NOT a science fiction story. It was a cliched story about a guy bringing home a partner that his family didn't approve of, with a silly "you get wet when you lie" bit tossed in at the beginning to somehow qualify it for the Hugo with a mild fantasy element.
It was another "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" plot retread, only this time the "Who" was gay. So what? It was still a story we've all heard or seen a hundred times in the past 30 years - just substitute your race / religion / ethnicity of choice. What makes this one memorable, besides the sexuality of the main characters?
I cannot believe there wasn't a better science fiction short story published in 2013 than Chu's story. It's not the genre that's floundering, it's what the people who are running the Hugo consider to be "worthy" that has plummeted.
Not to mention that these silly trolley-switch arguments completely sidestep the bigger ethical question: If switching to an all-autonomous fleet results in traffic fatalities being cut by an order of magnitude (3,000 vs. 30,000 per year), isn't it unethical not to switch to SDCs as soon as possible?
Autonomous cars may not be perfect, but they will almost certainly be a damned sight better than 99.9% of all drivers out there today. We kill 30,000 people a year in the U.S. alone, maim another 2 million, and somehow that's acceptable because a human being was behind the wheel? That's what makes the whole "what if the car kills my child instead of yours" argument so laughable. Hey, how about we stop killing a lot less of everyone's kids? How's that for a solution?
SDCs are coming, and the knee-jerk reaction of "You'll pry my steering wheel out of my cold dead hands" is entirely predictable. No doubt people were making similar arguments about keeping their horses a hundred years ago. And here's why SDCs are inevitable: once the technology exists, and young people start using it, they will see no point in having a driver's license or learning how to drive. Then, as the older generation ages to the point where their eyesight and reflexes fail, they will be demanding SDCs, with the AARP pushing for their adoption. In a generation, manual automobiles will be curiosities owned by collectors.
Having visited the NSA facility myself many years ago, it is incredibly stupid. The military guards at the NSA are extremely alert, extremely competent, and very well armed. They will not hesitate to point a gun in your direction, or open fire if you fail to immediately comply with their orders.
They are not your typical security guards or your typical police. They are a level above that, and you do not want to mess with them.
No, BTC theft is indeed a problem with BTC itself. Evolution operated a BTC escrow service between its buyers and sellers. Unless the buyer and seller trust each other implicitly, escrow is essential for large remote transactions to ensure that no one gets ripped off, because (as we all know) BTC transactions are irreversible.
What Evolution did was empty out its escrow accounts and run off with the BTC from all the pending transactions. There is now essentially zero likelihood of them being punished, or the BTC being recovered.
And there you have the problem with BTC in a nutshell. Whether you use an exchange to transfer BTC to fiat, or use an escrow service to hold it pending a transaction, who do you trust to do the job? Particularly in an unregulated, pseudo-anonymous economic model where theft and graft go unpunished on a regular basis?
BTC has jumped the shark and is now moving into the long-term "let's keep fleecing the newbies" phase, just as you see with gold and silver "investment" companies. As long as there are suckers willing to exchange good money for BTC, there will be a very long line of criminals ready and willing to take it from them.
Now all the Winklevoss twins need to do is find is a reason for the average American consumer to buy BTC and use them, instead of using credit cards and debit cards that are protected from fraud and loss by federal law. Bitcoin may be a great deal for businesses, but it is a terrible deal for consumers, and without people on both sides of the economic equation it is slowly dying (witness the long slow decline in price, and the fact that a few hundred thousand people at most possess all the BTC in circulation).
That's the crux of the problem, and the one that no one has figured out yet, beyond yelling "Those evil bankers and politicians are robbing you with fiat money!" Right, so I'll pay my percentage to the twins, instead of my local bank? That's like choosing to be eaten by jackals instead of wolves.
Bitcoin proponents may disagree with that number, but for the sake of argument let's assume that 10X as many people (2.5 million) hold BTC. That would mean 0.0357% of the world's population holds about 13.7 million BTC (all that have been mined so far). Since only 21 million BTC can ever be mined, then those 0.0357% possess 65.2% of all the BTC that ever will exist. With those numbers, the speculative hoarding frenzy surrounding Bitcoin is easy to understand.
Given also that many Bitcoin "believers" preach that BTC will one day become the dominant world currency, then what we have is a potential wealth gap that makes the wealth gap in the U.S. look positively socialist in comparison.
That, to me, is what makes Bitcoin so downright bizarre. A bunch of people have convinced themselves that all fiat currencies will collapse one day, making them rich beyond the dreams of avarice, since no one will think of using any cryptocurrency except BTC, because ... well, just because. And then they will own the world.
I've never understood the logic behind statements like this. There are an infinite possible number of cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency is nothing but a mathematical algorithm being run on a lot of computers. By its very nature, it can't be in limited supply. Saying that Bitcoin is valuable because it's scare is like saying that digital music or digital video must be valuable because they're scarce.
Any one, at any time, can create his own blockchain and create a Bitcoin clone. After that, all he need to do is persuade other people to adopt his blockchain, and a new standard has been created, with the originator becoming "wealthy". In fact, I suspect that this idea may suddenly occur to the operators of one of the big idled mining centers over the next few months.
And before anyone says, "But Bitcoin was first!", let me reply, "Friendster and MySpace".
If you had actually bothered to watch the video, or read the transcript, you'd know that EnOcean is not using RF harvesting to power any of their devices. They are using mechanical, solar, and thermoelectric energy harvesting techniques to power ultra-low power sensors, and to generate RF signals to control other powered appliances (e.g. desk lamps). They are using clever engineering, but they are not making any claims that violate the laws of physics.
iFind was a scam. There was no way that a device that size could harvest, store, and utilize RF energy at the levels claimed by them. Not to mention that the so-called "inventor", supposedly with multiple advanced degrees in engineering and medicine, had absolutely no presence or history on the web.
And Slashdot didn't "kill" iFind. Kickstarter killed it, after performing a little due diligence and realizing that something was fishy with WeTag. But if Slashdot helped pushed Kickstarter into checking into the background of WeTag's principals, then so much the better.
Energy harvesting from ambient RF does work, but to capture significant amounts of energy requires lots of area (e.g. an antenna or large pickup coil), or to have RF energy beamed directly at the device. At no time does EnOcean claim to be using RF harvesting to power their devices; they are only using ultra-low power RF radio bursts for short-range communication.
Which, of course, is why people carry credit cards, because it lets them dispute the charge without going to the effort of filing a lawsuit to get redress.
It's inconvenient and dangerous to walk around with that much cash, which is why we have a banking system. My bank electronically transfers the money to the seller's bank after I sign the paperwork, in the presence of an attorney and licensed agents. It gives me peace of mind, it prevents me from being ripped off, and once I sign, I walk out of the office and I'm done. So exactly what advantage does BTC provide to such a transaction, when it's exactly like carrying a big bundle of cash?
And I won't even get into the insanity of taking out a home loan in a deflationary economy. You really think that everyone is going to pay for homes and cars in full, without loans?
No one is going to force me to use CurrentC, and chip-and-PIN is intended to reduce credit card fraud, not make me to eat any loss if my account is compromised. On the other hand, I know that a BTC transaction would absolutely force me to eat the loss, because that's exactly how the system is designed to behave.
You're just dancing around the inconvenient fact that consumers have no incentive to use BTC over credit cards. It's a market for speculators and early adopters who are fervently hoping that someone else will buy their BTC and pump up the price, but no rational consumer (at least in the U.S. or Europe) has any incentive to do so.
Not just sketchy, but pointless (at least to the average consumer).
What sane person would use a debit card that mandates irreversible transactions if you are cheated by a merchant, makes you liable for all fraudulent use of the card, and takes several minutes for a purchase to be validated? Because that's basically what Bitcoin is. It's like stepping 50 years into the past, into a world without consumer protection laws.
If you were an early adopter of BTC, obviously you have a huge incentive to push for wider adoption, as this lets you turn your CPU-mined BTC into free money. But if you are someone who has never touched BTC in your life, you have no incentive to buy them now, and none to use them. It doesn't matter how many merchants accept BTC, because the average shopper would be insane to use them.
Regardless of what happens to the exchanges, BTC has hit a brick wall in adoption. Read about the experiences of merchants in Florida who signed up to accept BTC prior to the Bitcoin Bowl. Several of them stopped accepting BTC when it became apparent that no one was spending them.
Yes, BTC is exactly that for a business, but exactly what incentive does a consumer have to use it?
Right now, if I want to buy something with U.S. dollars, I pull out my credit card or my cell phone, and I buy it. The transaction is completed in a matter of seconds (no waiting for verification via a blockchain), and if I use Apple Pay or Google Wallet, it is extremely secure.
On top of that, if I am cheated by the merchant, I can contact the credit card company and dispute the charges. Furthermore, even if my credit card is somehow compromised, I am only liable for $50 maximum by law, without having to go to court or sue anyone.
What does BTC do for me? First, I have to buy BTC, and then spend it quickly before the value changes. Second, if the merchant cheats me, too bad. BTC gives him all the power - transactions are irreversible. Third, if my BTC wallet is compromised, I can kiss my BTC goodbye. All of the consumer protections that I enjoy with credit cards are gone. So exactly what do I get out of the deal?
For the average consumer, Bitcoin is a solution in search of a problem. BTC may be a great way to buy contraband, or to send money to someone in a 3rd world country, but that is hardly something the average person bothers with on a regular basis.
Bitcoin is a niche product, and will remain so, despite every effort by BTC evangelists to persuade consumers to give them real money in exchange for their cryptocoins. Someone give me a reason to use BTC on a regular basis that doesn't involve some idealistic "screw the establishment, fiat currency is evil" rationalization. As a consumer, I don't see the point.
The same thing my generation did: ignore the self-styled "experts" who tell you you're doing it all wrong, and trust your own best judgment instead.
The world is chock full of wonderful theories about child-rearing and education that might provide better outcomes if we all had infinite time, infinite patience, and infinite resources to try them out. But we don't, so we do the best we can with what we have. That is particularly true when you are a parent of a young child.
This reminds me of the current fuss over "flipped classrooms". Yes, it seems like an interesting idea, and it might provide better outcomes, but it requires several outstanding teaching assistants who understand the concepts well enough to provide one-on-one instruction during class time.
In the real world most of my teaching assistants don't understand the material any better than my students. So unless my employer can figure out how to clone me, I'm going to stick with what works, rather than lose sleep over what is impractical to even attempt.
This, a thousand times over. Having a "free energy" machine, if it existed, would be like owning a machine that printed money.
Rossi claims he has constructed 1 MW reactors. Assuming this was true, and assuming Rossi could sell that power for just $0.10 USD per kW-hr, then he has a machine that effectively generates income at the rate of $100 / hour. Use half of that income for operating costs and personal expenses, and Rossi makes a net profit of $36,000 a month if the machine runs 24/7.
In a year Rossi has $432,000. Long before then, he would be able to build a second generator, doubling his income. Assuming one generator could "double" itself every six months, in five years he has a profit of $18.4M USD each month. In less than a decade, he is the wealthiest man on the planet.
So why isn't Rossi doing that, instead of trying to get investors to write checks? Because he can't, of course. Like all frauds and pseudoscientists, he is utterly incapable of actually doing anything useful with his so-called "invention".
No, they accept USD, or whatever fiat currency they specify, with a transaction processor like Bitpay converting BTC to fiat on the spot.
Lots of companies "accept" BTC that way, but they're really getting paid in some national currency. It is rather disingenuous of people to claim otherwise.
And yes, a company would be bonkers to accept, and keep, anything as volatile as BTC.
This is way too much effort, unless you happen to enjoy yanking some chains over the phone.
Here's how you quit Comcast:
(1) Disconnect every piece of Comcast equipment in your home.
(2) Load it in a box, and put the box in your car.
(3) Drive to the nearest Comcast customer center.
(4) Dump the box on the counter and tell the rep: "I wish to terminate my service immediately."
No one will argue with you. You have completely bypassed Comcast's customer retention process by doing this. Pay the amount due on your bill, get a receipt with a complete list of the equipment you've turned in, then go home.