I believe digital comb filters were the last real advance of the pre-ATSC American TV industry. The things of that era that really MATTERED to consumers, like Trinitron picture tubes, S-Video, and PLL digital tuners, were all Japanese. What remained of the American VCR manufacturers was incinerated once Sony decided to allow VHS mfrs. to license its Betamax IP (remember how, pre-1986, VHS VCRs had to do the "pause-chuckka-chuckka" dance to switch between 'play' and ff/rw? Or the switch from low-fi linear stereo to hi-fi stereo? Or the arrival of "high quality" mode? Those were all improvements that used Betamax IP to improve VHS.
I don't remember how American, European, or Japanese LaserDisc and CED videodisc were... from what I recall, they were invented in the US (LaserDisc) and Europe (CED), then repeatedly bungled on both sides of the Atlantic until DVD killed them both off once & for all. AFAIK, LaserDisc was eventually popular in Japan, but Japanese players were never really marketed in the US because Sony & others thought the US market was too damaged & tainted by RCA to even bother with.
It's hard to believe, but at one time, Sony was actually the industry's innovative disruptor... then they started buying studios & distribution rights, and turned into late-80s IBM (where everything cool that the engineers came up with got ruined by the "service/content" side of the company.)
The problem is, components like USB ports (or Lightning connectors) can break, and if the port is a proprietary part used only by Apple or Samsung, there IS NO second source for replacement port connectors to solder on. Quite a few Android devices in particular had SERIOUS problems with broken USB ports (especially when the device was used by toddlers or pre-teens).
Also, VERY FEW 'bricked' devices are irreparable via JTAG... but if a mfr. is allowed to declare a model 'eol' and refuse any future service requests, while simultaneously refusing to release their JTAG utilities & rom images, you'd be fucked unless someone leaked the tool to XDA & the mfr. didn't throw DMCA takedown notices at them. (Motorola comes to mind as one of the more aggressive mfrs. determined to keep their software tools out of 'unauthorized' hands).
The deathblow that killed the American TV-manufacturing industry was LCD TVs. LCDs are something profoundly subject to economies of scale... especially in larger sizes, with few/no dead/stuck pixels. The LCD panel accounts for most of the BOM cost. With Asian companies making basically 100% of consumer LCD panels, there's basically no real profit for a company to buy those panels & assemble them into TVs in America. Or Europe. I doubt whether many TVs are even still made in JAPAN (Japan hasn't been a 'cheap labor' country for at least the past 25+ years).
DLP TVs were the dying gasp of the American, European, and Japanese TV industries, because they were so big & heavy, the shipping logistics ALONE made assembly within surface-transportation-range almost a necessity... and even then, "American" TVs were mostly assembled in Mexico by Japanese companies.
Zenith ultimately fucked ITSELF out of business. ~10 years ago, DirecTV wanted to make a "whole house" DVR that rebroadcast recorded content over the customer's existing rg59/rg6 coax using ATSC (so you wouldn't need a box per tv... you'd just tune one tv to channel 2, one to channel 3, and so on, then associate the RF remote for that room with that channel. Everything went well when the prototypes were developed... then Zenith quoted them a jaw-dropping price for the 8vsb modulator's chipset that was so outrageously expensive, the American satellite tv industry just abandoned the whole idea of ATSC modulators in favor of ethernet (or MoCA, or HomePlug, or wifi) networked mini-STBs. Basically, Zenith and what was left of the American TV industry figured they could collectively milk consumers for ATSC-related royalties, and didn't expect DirecTV (and Dish network) to do an end-run around their broadcast-related ATSC patents.
In Florida, Yugos were never common. The tacked-on air conditioner wasn't very good & added about $1,500 to the price (neutralizing most of its perceived low cost). The Toyota MR2 & Nissan Pulsar were only slightly more expensive, and infinitely more popular among kids at my high school (source: I was in high school & shopping for my first car at the time. I think I *might* have seen three Yugos 'in the wild', ever. )
Seriously. Am I the only klutz who'd destroy an all-glass bezel-free phone within three months if I couldn't wrap it in a drop-protecting case?
Gorilla Glass? Pfft. Drop *any* phone glass-down onto asphalt or ceramic tile from 6 feet without a proper case. If it doesn't get cracked the first time, it almost certainly WILL the second time around.
Personally, I'd be afraid to even HOLD a bezel-free phone that couldn't have a robust case. My phone get fumbled, dropped, or accidentally semi-flung AT LEAST once or twice per month.
Why does Turkey seem to have such an active, long-standing dislike for the Kurds? It's not like they could have presented any real threat to Turkey during Saddam Hussein's reign (they were too busy being persecuted & repressed by Hussein), and I've gotten the impression that BOTH Turkey & the Kurds have generally been friendly with the US... so why do they seem to hate *each other* so much?
Gas station sites are REALLY expensive to redevelop for different uses due to their substantial decontamination costs. Most gas stations are plastic-lined pools of petrochemical stew underneath the pumps & pavement. That's why gas stations usually get replaced by another gas station. And if it's an old gas station that closed & was abandoned 30 years ago (by virtue of being in an inner city, or some rural small town with an Interstate 4 miles away where all the gas stations are NOW), all bets are off... with the exception of PRIME sites in places like New York, San Francisco, or downtown Miami, most of those old gas station sites would cost more to clean up than they're actually WORTH as vacant lots.
I remember seeing a real estate ad for an old, long-closed gas station north of downtown Miami during the hottest part of the real estate bubble. It was listed for $200,000. Next door was a smaller property listed for $3 MILLION. There's now a new skyscraper under construction there, but it took almost 15 years for land values in that area to finally become high enough for investors to gamble on potentially *unlimited* environmental cleanup costs. The only suburban sites with comparable cleanup costs are dry cleaners (the old ones that did the cleaning on-site, not the new ones in strip malls that are just dropoff & pickup sites for some distant regional facility).
The top end for the poorest 51% of Americans might be $19k, but the cars bought by the other 49% are *WAY* more expensive in real life. SUVs *start* in the mid-20s, and quickly soar to 40k or more by the time you add the usual soccer-mom options. Ditto for pickup trucks. You'd be hard-pressed to even buy a new Hyundai Elantra (or stripped-down Ford F-150) with A/C, automatic transmission, and the amenities most middle-class Americans would view as non-negotiable requirements for less than $25k after adding the usual fees, taxes, and everything else. New cars are EXPENSIVE. Poor Americans compensate by keeping them longer or buying used. If Tata (an Indian carmaker) opened dealers in the US and sold acceptable new cars for $15,000, they'd *literally* need tasers & cattle prods to beat back parents of high school students. My bro did the math, and unhesitatingly threw down about $21k to buy his 16 year old daughter a Hyundai Accent in lieu of allowing her anywhere *near* his BMW or her mom's Honda Odyssey. By his reckoning, it was a cheap investment to protect two VERY expensive assets.
NO car available for retail purchase TODAY is capable of autonomous driving. Not even Tesla officially claims their autopilot can safely deal with anything besides lanekeeping & collision-avoidance... and even then, can only safely run at full speed on limited-access divided highways that aren't construction zones, or at low speed in bumper-to-bumper gridlock on city streets. They'll *allow* you to use autopilot under more experimental conditions, but it's not a feature they officially advertise (because they could take it away at any time with a pushed software update).
As for "cars will be stranded in place, and owners will have to pay for disposal" -- 8 years from now -- the author is frankly nuts. The only way that could happen is if the government banned gas-fueled vehicles. Republicans would never vote for such a law at any time in the conceivable future, and I'd guess that probably 95% of DEMOCRATS would hold their noses & vote Republican if it were the only way to avoid having their most (or second-most) expensive asset rendered worthless by Democrats... which is why the Democrats wouldn't do it, either.
The author also egregiously underestimates the impact of a car's sunk cost. Even if gas soared to $20/gallon & electricity were free, it STILL wouldn't be economically worthwhile for people who've spent $30k-$60k or more for a car to just dump it... even MORESO if resale values tanked.
Not to mention, the free tax ride electric car owners currently enjoy won't last forever. I give 20 years, max, until at least 80% of states abolish gas taxes & replace them with some alternative that electric car owners can't sidestep (like tax meters on charging stations).
Like the trailer for National Lampoon's (2016) Vacation. If you've seen all the trailers, there's *literally* no reason to bother with the actual movie... everything *funny* is in the trailer. The rest of the movie is just padding that adds nothing new to what you've already seen dozens of times in the trailer.
Don't get me wrong... I *loved* its trailers... but the actual movie just seemed totally anticlimactic.
Or a car being flipped. Jesus, I cringe every time I see cars flipping in front of some kind of energy release (bomb, earthquake, alien laser beam, whatever).
The only thing more trite than flipping cars is a "YA" movie where pampered suburban American teens somehow save the universe against impossible odds, then manage to find "true love" in the final 17 minutes while some anonymous female vocalist sings some unrecognizable song with lyrics that *almost* sound like gaussian-blurred random English.
Exactly. AFAIK, a phone being rooted has ZERO necessary impact on the ability of users to *COPY* DRM'ed video, because the GPU *itself* handles the key exchange. All the OS does is ferry encrypted data between the network stack and GPU.
It's been that way for almost a decade now, ever since Vista introduced 'protected video path' requirements. Even if a chipset isn't for PCs, chipmakers bake support for PVP into the silicon *just in case* someone wants to use that chipset in a device running Windows.
Ultimately, this isn't about users being able to PIRATE & COPY video, it's about being able to force them to wach it a specific way (ie, preventing users from skipping commercials... Protected Video Path prevents copying to other devices, but doesn't prevent pre-buffering or fast forward/rewind by users). As fashionable as it is to vilify Microsoft, they actually made a point of designing PVP to restrict copying without restricting the user's CONTROL of video playback).
We need USB drives (mimicking a SAN) with physical switches to put them into one of four states:
* normal operation
* write-only until full, then read-only until physically reconfigured. Basic info like free space can be read, but that's all. Otherwise, it's a lockbox.
* write-mostly until full, then read-only until physically reconfigured
* a hybrid of the second & third modes... everything is encrypted using a random key printed on the label. Without the key, it acts like write-only. With the key, it acts like WORM. The idea is that the local PC might effectively see it as write-only, but an admin with the key could examine it more closely.
Then, we could have background backups as changes get made, secure in the knowledge that ransomware can't fuck with the backups *themselves* (the way they can NOW).
People might still get stuck having to buy a new $150-200 backup drive if malware filled their current one (since even after reinstalling Windows, you'd have to be crazy to erase your one good backup copy until you had a new backup AND "enough" time elapsed without incident), and specific computers might still be rendered unusable for extended periods of time (since even with gigabit ethernet or usb 3, it takes hours to shovel terabytes of files around), but it would still beat losing everything in an instant (possibly, due to the actions of somebody ELSE doing something stupid/careless on your LAN, or one of the endless exploits in routers, modems, IoT devices, or operating systems (Linux has malware too... it's just mostly ignored by hackers because there aren't as many naive users running Firefox as root as there are naive users with unpatched old versions of Windows). If you can't protect YOURSELF 100% from the effects of ransomware, at least you could buffer yourself against their primary vector of harm.
The company behind most cruise-ship broadband is "MTN". A few years ago, they launched a hybrid service that used satellites at sea, and fixed microwave links in port... then started adding more and more towers *away* from port, so that the number of ships that depend on satellite connectivity at any one time keeps getting smaller... at least, in the Caribbean & Alaska.
The main problem with transatlantic cruises is that most are just 'repositioning' cruises that happen twice a year (when many Cabibbean ships get moved to Europe in the late spring before hurricane season, then get moved back in the late fall before winter arrives. Most of THOSE cruises don't hug the coastlines of Greenland & Iceland, so they couldn't use line-of-sight terrestrial links anyway.
When it comes to maritime broadband over the open sea far from land (especially away from busy shipping lanes), coverage is STILL pretty dire. Spot beams have improved things a lot in the areas with enough ship-density to justify coverage, but for about 80% of the open sea, you *might* have one or two satellites covering an area the size of the north Atlantic with about as much bandwidth for all users to share as Hughes.net had for rural American users circa 2000.
SSL/TLS happened. In 2012, most sites & apps didn't use SSL. Now, they do... and a bunch of SSL handshakes for ephemeral connections from multiple users at once can make a formerly-tolerable slow data link grind to a complete halt. First, the handshakes start failing, because TLS has strict time limits to limit replay attacks & make MITM harder. Then, the repeated handshaking attempts end up saturating the link so nothing else -- not even DNS lookups -- can get through. Even with a few hundred kbps, it doesn't take many iphones & Android phones making nonstop background connections to bring a shared slow connection to its knees... or some other user attempting to navigate to an ad-saturated web page that literally needs to establish TLS connections to several DOZEN hosts just to finish loading. And most of those requests can't be cached, so they keep generating more and more.
That's why there's now a RFC making its way through IETF to allow a server to be configured to send unencrypted-but-signed files over TLS (instead of encrypting everything)... the idea is that a bank's logo images, css stylesheets, or Javascript libraries aren't a secret, but have to be sent via TLS to prevent MITM. By allowing signing-without-encryption, networks will be able to inspect & cache files the remote host marks as 'not sensitive'.
Technically, CDMA mobile phone service was developed in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. See the 'history' section at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Afaik, it's one of the few examples of something invented in the former USSR that actually went on to become a worldwide consumer technology a few decades later (3G-GSM *is* wideband CDMA). If Leonid Kupriyanovich (its primary inventor) had been American, he would have probably died as a Silicon Valley multi-billionaire and had his name mentioned in the same sentence as Alexander Graham Bell in modern history books. He designed a working pocket-sized cell phone in the SIXTIES.
I believe a stable geosynchronous orbit would require substantial acceleration in the "horizontal" direction, too (possibly even MORE than the required vertical thrust). Thrusting it ONLY upwards would basically just put the ISS into a Molniya-like orbit... over time, it would fall closer to Earth at perigee, and swing further from Earth at apogee, until it eventually burned up during a perigee that grazed the atmosphere.
The problem is, the ISS is too big to risk deorbiting as a whole a-la-Skylab. It would cost billions just to deconstruct it for a safe (on paper, at least) deorbiting.
If we truly decided to trash it, we'd be better off giving it one last hard shove upwards (even at the risk of causing structural failure) into an orbit high enough to last another 50-100 years just to keep it around as a source of in-orbit scrap metal. If we regressed to the point where it crashed anyway sometime after 2100, potential damage from its crash will be the least of humanity's problems.
That said, I personally doubt whether Russia would even *allow* the US to deorbit the non-Russian half. If we got to the point of trying, Russia would probably refuse to ferry NASA's crew to do the job, SpaceX would find excuses to decline the job, and the Russians would take over the entire station after sending the Americans home.
Would the US *seriously* risk a shooting war with Russia over its right to deorbit & destroy our half of the ISS? I doubt it. We'd bitch, send them a letter telling them how *very* angry we are... then go off & sulk. Russia would send annual rent checks to Washington as payment that the US would refuse to cash, and that would be the end of it.
Transatlantic cruises have *incredibly* bad internet connectivity. As in, 19.2kbps when it works... and mostly, it doesn't.
Caribbean cruises have fast internet because the Bahamas only has a few TV stations, but the same ~900MHz of UHF spectrum as the US, and cruise ships can have good antennas & high-power radios (unlike cell phones) to communicate with a LTE or WiMax site 40-80 miles away (few caribbean cruise routes are ever more than 100 miles from an island). There's also a huge market for Caribbean-cruise internet service, so the infrastructure got built. In contrast, the North Atlantic has a lot less cruise-ship traffic to pay for it, and sticking LTE towers in a glacier field in Greenland is several orders of magnitude harder than doing it on a caribbean island.
There's satellite too, but for Caribbean cruises, the *really* fast connectivity is terrestrial.
I'm pretty sure that Win95OSR2 couldn't do USB for anything besides mice (maybe keyboards, too). I distinctly remember using Win95osr2 for almost everything up until Win2k came out because 98's performance sucked miserably on my laptop (I think it had a 33mhz Pentium & 4 megs of ram), but 95osr2 ran acceptably. There was some USB peripheral (my Handspring Visor, I think... it might have been a webcam or flash drive) that forced me to use 98. I ended up installing Win98, then used a program called "98Lite" to replace Win98's (Active Desktop based) Explorer with Win95's simpler (but much, much faster) Explorer, which allowed me to have both USB *and* tolerable performance.
My copy of Win95osr2 was an OEM system-builder copy.
I can't think of any offhand, but I think Java's strategy is to have two heaps. A small "young" heap, and a much larger "main" heap. As the 'young' heap fills up, its oldest objects get moved to the main heap. The idea is that by the time you *have* to do GC, most of the transient objects have already fallen out of scope. And if the main heap gets full, it tries to create a new, bigger heap to take the old one's place & can have live objects in all active heaps during the move. Add OS-managed virtual memory, and there's almost never a need to "stop the world" (*)
I'm not 100% sure, but I think weakly-referenced objects have a heap of their own as of sometime after jdk5.
(*) Android normally doesn't use virtual memory, but most kernels have it as a latent ability. The problem is, historically, the flash controllers didn't do wear-leveling well, so putting a swap partition on your phone's internal flash could, in fact, trip the 'max erasure' counter within a few months. Most class 6 (or better) microSD is fast enough to be a net improvement for swap space (and can be replaced without consequence if you wear it out due to excessive writes), but Google has always *hated* microSD, so using swap requires both microSD *and* a custom ROM.
Since LCDs became dominant & started dying from stupid shit like bad capacitors & heat-induced failure after just a few years.
Between 1970 and 2005, my parents bought three TVs for the living room... the only one that actually *died* was the third (in retrospect, almost certainly due to bad capacitors since they bought it around 1999). They're now on post-2005 TV #3. All 3 were LCD TVs that just died for no apparent reason.
Logical conclusion: 21st-century TVs are built like shit & die after a few years. Old TVs were built like Soviet tanks, lasted forever, and could actually be cost-effectively *repaired* if they did somehow die, because they weren't just one big 65-inch integrated circuit recklessly-inadequate heat-management that has everything on a single circuit board that would have to be replaced in its entirety, at 2-3x the price of a NEW TV.
I use GasBuddy all the time, but whenever we have an out-of-the-blue 10-15c price spike in South Florida, there's a good chance that even the stations it shows with the cheaper price will have spiked too unless they've had a report within the past 15-30 minutes... after 1 hour, you might have 50-50 odds of getting the lower price. After 2 hours, forget it. A few weeks ago, we had one of those spikes... almost simultaneously, every station suddenly spiked from $2.21-2.35/gallon to $2.39-2.54.
Yep. I've had a Nexus 6p for a year, and *still* own exactly one cable that works reliably. I have two others I bought on Amazon that are flaky for data, and almost useless for charging (it won't fast-charge with them). The USB organization has really dropped the ball when it comes to certification & enforcement. Finding good USB-C cables is still mostly a blind shot in the dark on Amazon... and it'll be a cold day in *hell* before I pay $30+ for a cable at Best Buy.
Micro USB is almost *impossible* to plug into "by feel" -- at best, you'll be wrong half the time, *guaranteed*, if you try. And probably 10-25% of the time when you *look*. It's just too thin to easily distinguish which end is the wide/narrow one without good lighting & active effort.
Mini-USB was pretty easy to plug in, though, which probably explains why so many portable hard drives continued to use it long after micro-USB became the norm for almost everything else.
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I believe digital comb filters were the last real advance of the pre-ATSC American TV industry. The things of that era that really MATTERED to consumers, like Trinitron picture tubes, S-Video, and PLL digital tuners, were all Japanese. What remained of the American VCR manufacturers was incinerated once Sony decided to allow VHS mfrs. to license its Betamax IP (remember how, pre-1986, VHS VCRs had to do the "pause-chuckka-chuckka" dance to switch between 'play' and ff/rw? Or the switch from low-fi linear stereo to hi-fi stereo? Or the arrival of "high quality" mode? Those were all improvements that used Betamax IP to improve VHS.
I don't remember how American, European, or Japanese LaserDisc and CED videodisc were... from what I recall, they were invented in the US (LaserDisc) and Europe (CED), then repeatedly bungled on both sides of the Atlantic until DVD killed them both off once & for all. AFAIK, LaserDisc was eventually popular in Japan, but Japanese players were never really marketed in the US because Sony & others thought the US market was too damaged & tainted by RCA to even bother with.
It's hard to believe, but at one time, Sony was actually the industry's innovative disruptor... then they started buying studios & distribution rights, and turned into late-80s IBM (where everything cool that the engineers came up with got ruined by the "service/content" side of the company.)
The problem is, components like USB ports (or Lightning connectors) can break, and if the port is a proprietary part used only by Apple or Samsung, there IS NO second source for replacement port connectors to solder on. Quite a few Android devices in particular had SERIOUS problems with broken USB ports (especially when the device was used by toddlers or pre-teens).
Also, VERY FEW 'bricked' devices are irreparable via JTAG... but if a mfr. is allowed to declare a model 'eol' and refuse any future service requests, while simultaneously refusing to release their JTAG utilities & rom images, you'd be fucked unless someone leaked the tool to XDA & the mfr. didn't throw DMCA takedown notices at them. (Motorola comes to mind as one of the more aggressive mfrs. determined to keep their software tools out of 'unauthorized' hands).
The deathblow that killed the American TV-manufacturing industry was LCD TVs. LCDs are something profoundly subject to economies of scale... especially in larger sizes, with few/no dead/stuck pixels. The LCD panel accounts for most of the BOM cost. With Asian companies making basically 100% of consumer LCD panels, there's basically no real profit for a company to buy those panels & assemble them into TVs in America. Or Europe. I doubt whether many TVs are even still made in JAPAN (Japan hasn't been a 'cheap labor' country for at least the past 25+ years).
DLP TVs were the dying gasp of the American, European, and Japanese TV industries, because they were so big & heavy, the shipping logistics ALONE made assembly within surface-transportation-range almost a necessity... and even then, "American" TVs were mostly assembled in Mexico by Japanese companies.
Zenith ultimately fucked ITSELF out of business. ~10 years ago, DirecTV wanted to make a "whole house" DVR that rebroadcast recorded content over the customer's existing rg59/rg6 coax using ATSC (so you wouldn't need a box per tv... you'd just tune one tv to channel 2, one to channel 3, and so on, then associate the RF remote for that room with that channel. Everything went well when the prototypes were developed... then Zenith quoted them a jaw-dropping price for the 8vsb modulator's chipset that was so outrageously expensive, the American satellite tv industry just abandoned the whole idea of ATSC modulators in favor of ethernet (or MoCA, or HomePlug, or wifi) networked mini-STBs. Basically, Zenith and what was left of the American TV industry figured they could collectively milk consumers for ATSC-related royalties, and didn't expect DirecTV (and Dish network) to do an end-run around their broadcast-related ATSC patents.
In Florida, Yugos were never common. The tacked-on air conditioner wasn't very good & added about $1,500 to the price (neutralizing most of its perceived low cost). The Toyota MR2 & Nissan Pulsar were only slightly more expensive, and infinitely more popular among kids at my high school (source: I was in high school & shopping for my first car at the time. I think I *might* have seen three Yugos 'in the wild', ever. )
Seriously. Am I the only klutz who'd destroy an all-glass bezel-free phone within three months if I couldn't wrap it in a drop-protecting case?
Gorilla Glass? Pfft. Drop *any* phone glass-down onto asphalt or ceramic tile from 6 feet without a proper case. If it doesn't get cracked the first time, it almost certainly WILL the second time around.
Personally, I'd be afraid to even HOLD a bezel-free phone that couldn't have a robust case. My phone get fumbled, dropped, or accidentally semi-flung AT LEAST once or twice per month.
Why does Turkey seem to have such an active, long-standing dislike for the Kurds? It's not like they could have presented any real threat to Turkey during Saddam Hussein's reign (they were too busy being persecuted & repressed by Hussein), and I've gotten the impression that BOTH Turkey & the Kurds have generally been friendly with the US... so why do they seem to hate *each other* so much?
Gas station sites are REALLY expensive to redevelop for different uses due to their substantial decontamination costs. Most gas stations are plastic-lined pools of petrochemical stew underneath the pumps & pavement. That's why gas stations usually get replaced by another gas station. And if it's an old gas station that closed & was abandoned 30 years ago (by virtue of being in an inner city, or some rural small town with an Interstate 4 miles away where all the gas stations are NOW), all bets are off... with the exception of PRIME sites in places like New York, San Francisco, or downtown Miami, most of those old gas station sites would cost more to clean up than they're actually WORTH as vacant lots.
I remember seeing a real estate ad for an old, long-closed gas station north of downtown Miami during the hottest part of the real estate bubble. It was listed for $200,000. Next door was a smaller property listed for $3 MILLION. There's now a new skyscraper under construction there, but it took almost 15 years for land values in that area to finally become high enough for investors to gamble on potentially *unlimited* environmental cleanup costs. The only suburban sites with comparable cleanup costs are dry cleaners (the old ones that did the cleaning on-site, not the new ones in strip malls that are just dropoff & pickup sites for some distant regional facility).
The top end for the poorest 51% of Americans might be $19k, but the cars bought by the other 49% are *WAY* more expensive in real life. SUVs *start* in the mid-20s, and quickly soar to 40k or more by the time you add the usual soccer-mom options. Ditto for pickup trucks. You'd be hard-pressed to even buy a new Hyundai Elantra (or stripped-down Ford F-150) with A/C, automatic transmission, and the amenities most middle-class Americans would view as non-negotiable requirements for less than $25k after adding the usual fees, taxes, and everything else. New cars are EXPENSIVE. Poor Americans compensate by keeping them longer or buying used. If Tata (an Indian carmaker) opened dealers in the US and sold acceptable new cars for $15,000, they'd *literally* need tasers & cattle prods to beat back parents of high school students. My bro did the math, and unhesitatingly threw down about $21k to buy his 16 year old daughter a Hyundai Accent in lieu of allowing her anywhere *near* his BMW or her mom's Honda Odyssey. By his reckoning, it was a cheap investment to protect two VERY expensive assets.
NO car available for retail purchase TODAY is capable of autonomous driving. Not even Tesla officially claims their autopilot can safely deal with anything besides lanekeeping & collision-avoidance... and even then, can only safely run at full speed on limited-access divided highways that aren't construction zones, or at low speed in bumper-to-bumper gridlock on city streets. They'll *allow* you to use autopilot under more experimental conditions, but it's not a feature they officially advertise (because they could take it away at any time with a pushed software update).
As for "cars will be stranded in place, and owners will have to pay for disposal" -- 8 years from now -- the author is frankly nuts. The only way that could happen is if the government banned gas-fueled vehicles. Republicans would never vote for such a law at any time in the conceivable future, and I'd guess that probably 95% of DEMOCRATS would hold their noses & vote Republican if it were the only way to avoid having their most (or second-most) expensive asset rendered worthless by Democrats... which is why the Democrats wouldn't do it, either.
The author also egregiously underestimates the impact of a car's sunk cost. Even if gas soared to $20/gallon & electricity were free, it STILL wouldn't be economically worthwhile for people who've spent $30k-$60k or more for a car to just dump it... even MORESO if resale values tanked.
Not to mention, the free tax ride electric car owners currently enjoy won't last forever. I give 20 years, max, until at least 80% of states abolish gas taxes & replace them with some alternative that electric car owners can't sidestep (like tax meters on charging stations).
Like the trailer for National Lampoon's (2016) Vacation. If you've seen all the trailers, there's *literally* no reason to bother with the actual movie... everything *funny* is in the trailer. The rest of the movie is just padding that adds nothing new to what you've already seen dozens of times in the trailer.
Don't get me wrong... I *loved* its trailers... but the actual movie just seemed totally anticlimactic.
Or a car being flipped. Jesus, I cringe every time I see cars flipping in front of some kind of energy release (bomb, earthquake, alien laser beam, whatever).
The only thing more trite than flipping cars is a "YA" movie where pampered suburban American teens somehow save the universe against impossible odds, then manage to find "true love" in the final 17 minutes while some anonymous female vocalist sings some unrecognizable song with lyrics that *almost* sound like gaussian-blurred random English.
Exactly. AFAIK, a phone being rooted has ZERO necessary impact on the ability of users to *COPY* DRM'ed video, because the GPU *itself* handles the key exchange. All the OS does is ferry encrypted data between the network stack and GPU.
It's been that way for almost a decade now, ever since Vista introduced 'protected video path' requirements. Even if a chipset isn't for PCs, chipmakers bake support for PVP into the silicon *just in case* someone wants to use that chipset in a device running Windows.
Ultimately, this isn't about users being able to PIRATE & COPY video, it's about being able to force them to wach it a specific way (ie, preventing users from skipping commercials... Protected Video Path prevents copying to other devices, but doesn't prevent pre-buffering or fast forward/rewind by users). As fashionable as it is to vilify Microsoft, they actually made a point of designing PVP to restrict copying without restricting the user's CONTROL of video playback).
We need USB drives (mimicking a SAN) with physical switches to put them into one of four states:
* normal operation
* write-only until full, then read-only until physically reconfigured. Basic info like free space can be read, but that's all. Otherwise, it's a lockbox.
* write-mostly until full, then read-only until physically reconfigured
* a hybrid of the second & third modes... everything is encrypted using a random key printed on the label. Without the key, it acts like write-only. With the key, it acts like WORM. The idea is that the local PC might effectively see it as write-only, but an admin with the key could examine it more closely.
Then, we could have background backups as changes get made, secure in the knowledge that ransomware can't fuck with the backups *themselves* (the way they can NOW).
People might still get stuck having to buy a new $150-200 backup drive if malware filled their current one (since even after reinstalling Windows, you'd have to be crazy to erase your one good backup copy until you had a new backup AND "enough" time elapsed without incident), and specific computers might still be rendered unusable for extended periods of time (since even with gigabit ethernet or usb 3, it takes hours to shovel terabytes of files around), but it would still beat losing everything in an instant (possibly, due to the actions of somebody ELSE doing something stupid/careless on your LAN, or one of the endless exploits in routers, modems, IoT devices, or operating systems (Linux has malware too... it's just mostly ignored by hackers because there aren't as many naive users running Firefox as root as there are naive users with unpatched old versions of Windows). If you can't protect YOURSELF 100% from the effects of ransomware, at least you could buffer yourself against their primary vector of harm.
The company behind most cruise-ship broadband is "MTN". A few years ago, they launched a hybrid service that used satellites at sea, and fixed microwave links in port... then started adding more and more towers *away* from port, so that the number of ships that depend on satellite connectivity at any one time keeps getting smaller... at least, in the Caribbean & Alaska.
The main problem with transatlantic cruises is that most are just 'repositioning' cruises that happen twice a year (when many Cabibbean ships get moved to Europe in the late spring before hurricane season, then get moved back in the late fall before winter arrives. Most of THOSE cruises don't hug the coastlines of Greenland & Iceland, so they couldn't use line-of-sight terrestrial links anyway.
When it comes to maritime broadband over the open sea far from land (especially away from busy shipping lanes), coverage is STILL pretty dire. Spot beams have improved things a lot in the areas with enough ship-density to justify coverage, but for about 80% of the open sea, you *might* have one or two satellites covering an area the size of the north Atlantic with about as much bandwidth for all users to share as Hughes.net had for rural American users circa 2000.
SSL/TLS happened. In 2012, most sites & apps didn't use SSL. Now, they do... and a bunch of SSL handshakes for ephemeral connections from multiple users at once can make a formerly-tolerable slow data link grind to a complete halt. First, the handshakes start failing, because TLS has strict time limits to limit replay attacks & make MITM harder. Then, the repeated handshaking attempts end up saturating the link so nothing else -- not even DNS lookups -- can get through. Even with a few hundred kbps, it doesn't take many iphones & Android phones making nonstop background connections to bring a shared slow connection to its knees... or some other user attempting to navigate to an ad-saturated web page that literally needs to establish TLS connections to several DOZEN hosts just to finish loading. And most of those requests can't be cached, so they keep generating more and more.
That's why there's now a RFC making its way through IETF to allow a server to be configured to send unencrypted-but-signed files over TLS (instead of encrypting everything)... the idea is that a bank's logo images, css stylesheets, or Javascript libraries aren't a secret, but have to be sent via TLS to prevent MITM. By allowing signing-without-encryption, networks will be able to inspect & cache files the remote host marks as 'not sensitive'.
Technically, CDMA mobile phone service was developed in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. See the 'history' section at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Afaik, it's one of the few examples of something invented in the former USSR that actually went on to become a worldwide consumer technology a few decades later (3G-GSM *is* wideband CDMA). If Leonid Kupriyanovich (its primary inventor) had been American, he would have probably died as a Silicon Valley multi-billionaire and had his name mentioned in the same sentence as Alexander Graham Bell in modern history books. He designed a working pocket-sized cell phone in the SIXTIES.
I believe a stable geosynchronous orbit would require substantial acceleration in the "horizontal" direction, too (possibly even MORE than the required vertical thrust). Thrusting it ONLY upwards would basically just put the ISS into a Molniya-like orbit... over time, it would fall closer to Earth at perigee, and swing further from Earth at apogee, until it eventually burned up during a perigee that grazed the atmosphere.
The problem is, the ISS is too big to risk deorbiting as a whole a-la-Skylab. It would cost billions just to deconstruct it for a safe (on paper, at least) deorbiting.
If we truly decided to trash it, we'd be better off giving it one last hard shove upwards (even at the risk of causing structural failure) into an orbit high enough to last another 50-100 years just to keep it around as a source of in-orbit scrap metal. If we regressed to the point where it crashed anyway sometime after 2100, potential damage from its crash will be the least of humanity's problems.
That said, I personally doubt whether Russia would even *allow* the US to deorbit the non-Russian half. If we got to the point of trying, Russia would probably refuse to ferry NASA's crew to do the job, SpaceX would find excuses to decline the job, and the Russians would take over the entire station after sending the Americans home.
Would the US *seriously* risk a shooting war with Russia over its right to deorbit & destroy our half of the ISS? I doubt it. We'd bitch, send them a letter telling them how *very* angry we are... then go off & sulk. Russia would send annual rent checks to Washington as payment that the US would refuse to cash, and that would be the end of it.
Transatlantic cruises have *incredibly* bad internet connectivity. As in, 19.2kbps when it works... and mostly, it doesn't.
Caribbean cruises have fast internet because the Bahamas only has a few TV stations, but the same ~900MHz of UHF spectrum as the US, and cruise ships can have good antennas & high-power radios (unlike cell phones) to communicate with a LTE or WiMax site 40-80 miles away (few caribbean cruise routes are ever more than 100 miles from an island). There's also a huge market for Caribbean-cruise internet service, so the infrastructure got built. In contrast, the North Atlantic has a lot less cruise-ship traffic to pay for it, and sticking LTE towers in a glacier field in Greenland is several orders of magnitude harder than doing it on a caribbean island.
There's satellite too, but for Caribbean cruises, the *really* fast connectivity is terrestrial.
I'm pretty sure that Win95OSR2 couldn't do USB for anything besides mice (maybe keyboards, too). I distinctly remember using Win95osr2 for almost everything up until Win2k came out because 98's performance sucked miserably on my laptop (I think it had a 33mhz Pentium & 4 megs of ram), but 95osr2 ran acceptably. There was some USB peripheral (my Handspring Visor, I think... it might have been a webcam or flash drive) that forced me to use 98. I ended up installing Win98, then used a program called "98Lite" to replace Win98's (Active Desktop based) Explorer with Win95's simpler (but much, much faster) Explorer, which allowed me to have both USB *and* tolerable performance.
My copy of Win95osr2 was an OEM system-builder copy.
I can't think of any offhand, but I think Java's strategy is to have two heaps. A small "young" heap, and a much larger "main" heap. As the 'young' heap fills up, its oldest objects get moved to the main heap. The idea is that by the time you *have* to do GC, most of the transient objects have already fallen out of scope. And if the main heap gets full, it tries to create a new, bigger heap to take the old one's place & can have live objects in all active heaps during the move. Add OS-managed virtual memory, and there's almost never a need to "stop the world" (*)
I'm not 100% sure, but I think weakly-referenced objects have a heap of their own as of sometime after jdk5.
(*) Android normally doesn't use virtual memory, but most kernels have it as a latent ability. The problem is, historically, the flash controllers didn't do wear-leveling well, so putting a swap partition on your phone's internal flash could, in fact, trip the 'max erasure' counter within a few months. Most class 6 (or better) microSD is fast enough to be a net improvement for swap space (and can be replaced without consequence if you wear it out due to excessive writes), but Google has always *hated* microSD, so using swap requires both microSD *and* a custom ROM.
Since LCDs became dominant & started dying from stupid shit like bad capacitors & heat-induced failure after just a few years.
Between 1970 and 2005, my parents bought three TVs for the living room... the only one that actually *died* was the third (in retrospect, almost certainly due to bad capacitors since they bought it around 1999). They're now on post-2005 TV #3. All 3 were LCD TVs that just died for no apparent reason.
Logical conclusion: 21st-century TVs are built like shit & die after a few years. Old TVs were built like Soviet tanks, lasted forever, and could actually be cost-effectively *repaired* if they did somehow die, because they weren't just one big 65-inch integrated circuit recklessly-inadequate heat-management that has everything on a single circuit board that would have to be replaced in its entirety, at 2-3x the price of a NEW TV.
I use GasBuddy all the time, but whenever we have an out-of-the-blue 10-15c price spike in South Florida, there's a good chance that even the stations it shows with the cheaper price will have spiked too unless they've had a report within the past 15-30 minutes... after 1 hour, you might have 50-50 odds of getting the lower price. After 2 hours, forget it. A few weeks ago, we had one of those spikes... almost simultaneously, every station suddenly spiked from $2.21-2.35/gallon to $2.39-2.54.
Yep. I've had a Nexus 6p for a year, and *still* own exactly one cable that works reliably. I have two others I bought on Amazon that are flaky for data, and almost useless for charging (it won't fast-charge with them). The USB organization has really dropped the ball when it comes to certification & enforcement. Finding good USB-C cables is still mostly a blind shot in the dark on Amazon... and it'll be a cold day in *hell* before I pay $30+ for a cable at Best Buy.
Micro USB is almost *impossible* to plug into "by feel" -- at best, you'll be wrong half the time, *guaranteed*, if you try. And probably 10-25% of the time when you *look*. It's just too thin to easily distinguish which end is the wide/narrow one without good lighting & active effort.
Mini-USB was pretty easy to plug in, though, which probably explains why so many portable hard drives continued to use it long after micro-USB became the norm for almost everything else.