Chrysler-Fiat is a victim of the pique of its late chairman Sergio Marchionne, who pooh-poohed electric cars for years, not for any substantive reason but just because he took personal offense at the idea of governments telling him what kind of cars he had to produce and sell. He even famously dissed CF's own Fiat 500e, which is actually a pretty nice car, I personally like it better than any of the Teslas. But the point is to subsidize EVs at the expense of large, heavily polluting gas and diesel vehicles, and CF paying Tesla does just that, so seems to me this is just the law working as it should.
When I was a graduate student in 1973, scientists were already talking about a better model for publication, potentially bypassing for-profit publishers. Half a century later, we still have basically the same system. There are of course alternative journals that follow an open-access model, but many if not most laboratories can't afford to publish in them, at least not consistently. Before my retirement last year, I published my very last paper in an open-access journal, and it cost me about $3500 in open-access fees. It's very difficult to compare costs of open-access journals, which are paid by researchers, with those of paywall journals, which are paid by libraries. But I am not convinced there are any big savings to be had by switching to an open-access model.
The economics of news journalism is already completely broken and getting worse. Advertisers desperate to get readers' attention turn to obtrusive animated ads that only serve to annoy. News sites desperate for revenue permit this, even though it makes their pages basically unreadable. It's true even for sites that charge subscription fees, like NY Times. The only ad-free, readable sites are those supported by people or governments with a political ax to grind and a point to make. It's a perfect storm.
For thousands of years, coders have promised "to provide virtually unbreakable encryption". Hackers cracked all of them, usually quite quickly. I'll wager quantum encryption will fare no better.
US officials contend they were just following standard procedure and the rule of law, but Meng's arrest was anything but normal. Extending economic sanctions to companies that do business in Iran is one thing, but what other country would kidnap a high-profile foreign executive in transit at a foreign airport and incarcerate them for engaging in trade with a third country? North Korea, maybe? This is not normal procedure, it is shock-and-awe, a willful demonstration of just how far the US will go to work its will on other countries.
These complaints have gone on for decades, but all attempts by the scientific community to bypass of replace the big private academic publishers have resulted in systems with equally exorbitant costs, like the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals. The only difference is that instead of university libraries, scientists pay the costs from their grants. The last paper I published in an open-access journal cost me almost $3000 in publication fees. And the journal claims that still does not cover its full costs of publication!
If these shopping sites are so much better and more efficient than Google in identifying deals, surely word would get out and their popularity would soar. What I find is that, so often, they link to sites that don't even have the product available. Mostly, the aggregators just clutter up the search results when I am trying to find actual vendors. Yes, Google should pay much more to governments in the countries where it operates, but fining them for ad practices that are the only possible means of supporting their many free services, is not the way to do it.
Loss of the ability to tax economic activity is fast becoming the world's #2 problem, after climate. The US exerts vast effort trying to punish Iran, Russia, Cuba and others for alleged bad behavior and cajoles others to do the same, when the countries that really should be targeted are tax havens like Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Panama and Ireland.
Of all the problems with broadband access, bandwidth is the least of them, much less how FCC defines it. The actual problems are lack of competition, lack of transparency in pricing, deceptive advertising and cost per gigabyte of data. I have DSL. OK, I can't stream video in HD. But as far as downloading and submitting forms, reading news, logging comments and in general "participating in the digital economy", it's fine. I hate to agree with Ajit Pai, but on this issue he's right, we should be concentrating on people who have no broadband access, not raising the bandwidth of people who already have a 25/3 connection.
I have DSL and yes, it's about $60 once you add in regular phone service, all the fees and taxes and caller ID. I've looked into switching to fiber many times and always, it's difficult to get it for under $100 a month once the teaser rate expires. Currently, Verizon offers fiber internet with no phone for $40 a month plus $10 for a modem, plus unspecified fees and taxes, so let's say $60, but that's only for 1 year, after which they won't tell you what it costs even in the fine print!
Even as battery prices have fallen, it still costs much more to store and recover a kilowatt-hour of power from a battery, than to produce it in the first place. The battery is still by far the most expensive component of an EV, and (since there are so few moving parts) the first to wear out. To make it cost-effective for EV owners to wear out their batteries by renting them for storage, they would have to be paid triple or quadruple standard power rates, at least. But if EV sales really do take off as predicted, a more likely source of power storage will be a surplus of partially degraded used EV batteries, with too low capacity for on-road use but still perfectly adequate for stationary storage, where the energy/weight ratio is less critical.
In the 80's and 90's, when lead-acid batteries still ruled, some of the most popular EV conversion vehicles were compact pickups like the Ford Ranger and Chevy S-10. Ford even sold a production Ranger EV from 1998-2002. With the current popularity of pickup trucks, why is no one producing an electric pickup? How hard can it be?
Just like carbon capture, by the time they achieve useful power generation with fusion - if ever - there will be no need for it. Solar, wind and tidal generation with battery storage will be much cheaper and less polluting.
The average US household drives 20,000 miles a year. If all of that were electric, it would be roughly 6000 kWh per year, or about half the average total consumption of a US household. EVs will very soon be as convenient as gasoline cars and much cheaper overall to drive, so I would think adoption could happen quite rapidly and would sop up any excess electric power demand. It is a perfect match for solar energy because the cars can be charged anywhere anytime.
. . . . when they used to board beginning at the back of the plane? That at least made sense - you didn't have to crawl over people settling into the seats in the front. Now they still board by "zones", but it's not zones, it's nothing to do with zones, it's solely a question of status.
All self-playing video ads need to be blocked. Otherwise users are going to resort to 3rd party blockers. So many sites, including New York Times (which I pay for!) are practically unreadable without a blocker, due to animated ads.
..........that I grew up before era of smartphones and social media. I mean, I always knew I wasn't very popular, but at least I wasn't confronted with an unavoidable digital readout of my unpopularity hundreds of times a day.
France touts an end to its insignificant oil production. Meanwhile, Norway gloats about its aggressive renewable energy subsidies and emissions mandates, which are only made possible by the revenues from all the oil it produces for export.
The simple fact is that the essential quality control involved in scientific publication - vetting the scientific content and standardizing the presentation - is expensive to perform, and somebody has to pay for it. Traditionally, that work has been done by publishers who charge subscription fees for the service, and are periodically accused of price-gouging. Open-access journals which have attempted to bypass the commercial publishers have invariably discovered much to their dismay just how expensive it is. When they started, they predicted that vetting, copy-editing and maintaining an article online could easily be done for under $1000. But they now charge authors several thousand dollars to publish an article, money generally taken out of grant funds which otherwise would be used to support the actual research being reported. And still these open-access journals claim to be losing money. Is this a better system? I'm not so sure.
. . . before all this stuff started. I mean, I always knew I wasn't very popular, but at least I wasn't confronted with a real-time numerical readout of my unpopularity every minute of every day.
Probably the paperwork requirements are just BS, but simply putting obstacles in the path and making it more of a hassle to get these visas actually makes sense. In principle, you have to try to recruit US citizens first, but there are ways around that requirement. For example, you advertise an entry-level job with a low salary, reject applicants for not having some very specific job experience or skills, then hire a highly experienced overqualified foreigner at the same low salary. I'd be very surprised if it weren't true the in a majority of cases, H1-B holders were sought because they're younger and cheaper, not because they have special skills. What the government really ought to do is have an auction for these visas instead of a lottery, If Google, Microsoft et al. really need these people, they shouldn't mind paying $100,000 or more bounty to get them. Use the money to fund scholarships for US students in fields where there are supposedly such dire shortages, instead of saddling them with $100,000 of student debt.
When Tesla came on the scene I thought, what is this? What is point of making a $100,000 EV? You might sell a few to left-leaning celebs but the potential mass market for EVs is earthy, practical-minded former hippies like myself. What you need to make for us is a cheap vehicle to get from point A to point B without pollution, not a flashy status symbol. How wrong I was. Now mass-market EVs are plentiful, you can easily get a used one for under $10K, but the mass market itself has yet to materialize and Musk's high-end EVs still dominate. Seems my eco-friends are all buying gas Priuses instead. Of course it might be different if the big auto makers as well as the dealers hadn't fought EVs tooth-and-nail for so many years.
Since my R50 bought refurbished in 2004 and running an obsolete version of Lubuntu, suddenly won't play youtube videos anymore. Must be time to upgrade. Sure will miss that 4:3 screen though.
Unlike, say, MS-Office or Adobe Acrobat, no one is forced to use the Google search engine, for compatibility or any other reason. If users don't think it's showing them the best prices, they can use Bing or Yahoo or whatever. People use Google because it still gives the best search results. It's a free service after all, and if Google doesn't want to include comparison-shopping sites in the results, that should be its right. If Google were an EU-based company, it wouldn't be an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Chrysler-Fiat is a victim of the pique of its late chairman Sergio Marchionne, who pooh-poohed electric cars for years, not for any substantive reason but just because he took personal offense at the idea of governments telling him what kind of cars he had to produce and sell. He even famously dissed CF's own Fiat 500e, which is actually a pretty nice car, I personally like it better than any of the Teslas. But the point is to subsidize EVs at the expense of large, heavily polluting gas and diesel vehicles, and CF paying Tesla does just that, so seems to me this is just the law working as it should.
When I was a graduate student in 1973, scientists were already talking about a better model for publication, potentially bypassing for-profit publishers. Half a century later, we still have basically the same system. There are of course alternative journals that follow an open-access model, but many if not most laboratories can't afford to publish in them, at least not consistently. Before my retirement last year, I published my very last paper in an open-access journal, and it cost me about $3500 in open-access fees. It's very difficult to compare costs of open-access journals, which are paid by researchers, with those of paywall journals, which are paid by libraries. But I am not convinced there are any big savings to be had by switching to an open-access model.
The economics of news journalism is already completely broken and getting worse. Advertisers desperate to get readers' attention turn to obtrusive animated ads that only serve to annoy. News sites desperate for revenue permit this, even though it makes their pages basically unreadable. It's true even for sites that charge subscription fees, like NY Times. The only ad-free, readable sites are those supported by people or governments with a political ax to grind and a point to make. It's a perfect storm.
For thousands of years, coders have promised "to provide virtually unbreakable encryption". Hackers cracked all of them, usually quite quickly. I'll wager quantum encryption will fare no better.
US officials contend they were just following standard procedure and the rule of law, but Meng's arrest was anything but normal. Extending economic sanctions to companies that do business in Iran is one thing, but what other country would kidnap a high-profile foreign executive in transit at a foreign airport and incarcerate them for engaging in trade with a third country? North Korea, maybe? This is not normal procedure, it is shock-and-awe, a willful demonstration of just how far the US will go to work its will on other countries.
These complaints have gone on for decades, but all attempts by the scientific community to bypass of replace the big private academic publishers have resulted in systems with equally exorbitant costs, like the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals. The only difference is that instead of university libraries, scientists pay the costs from their grants. The last paper I published in an open-access journal cost me almost $3000 in publication fees. And the journal claims that still does not cover its full costs of publication!
If these shopping sites are so much better and more efficient than Google in identifying deals, surely word would get out and their popularity would soar. What I find is that, so often, they link to sites that don't even have the product available. Mostly, the aggregators just clutter up the search results when I am trying to find actual vendors. Yes, Google should pay much more to governments in the countries where it operates, but fining them for ad practices that are the only possible means of supporting their many free services, is not the way to do it.
Loss of the ability to tax economic activity is fast becoming the world's #2 problem, after climate. The US exerts vast effort trying to punish Iran, Russia, Cuba and others for alleged bad behavior and cajoles others to do the same, when the countries that really should be targeted are tax havens like Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Panama and Ireland.
Of all the problems with broadband access, bandwidth is the least of them, much less how FCC defines it. The actual problems are lack of competition, lack of transparency in pricing, deceptive advertising and cost per gigabyte of data. I have DSL. OK, I can't stream video in HD. But as far as downloading and submitting forms, reading news, logging comments and in general "participating in the digital economy", it's fine. I hate to agree with Ajit Pai, but on this issue he's right, we should be concentrating on people who have no broadband access, not raising the bandwidth of people who already have a 25/3 connection.
I have DSL and yes, it's about $60 once you add in regular phone service, all the fees and taxes and caller ID. I've looked into switching to fiber many times and always, it's difficult to get it for under $100 a month once the teaser rate expires. Currently, Verizon offers fiber internet with no phone for $40 a month plus $10 for a modem, plus unspecified fees and taxes, so let's say $60, but that's only for 1 year, after which they won't tell you what it costs even in the fine print!
Those of us who do actual work on a laptop have to suffer, just to please those lazy bums who want to watch movies that fill the whole screen.
Even as battery prices have fallen, it still costs much more to store and recover a kilowatt-hour of power from a battery, than to produce it in the first place. The battery is still by far the most expensive component of an EV, and (since there are so few moving parts) the first to wear out. To make it cost-effective for EV owners to wear out their batteries by renting them for storage, they would have to be paid triple or quadruple standard power rates, at least. But if EV sales really do take off as predicted, a more likely source of power storage will be a surplus of partially degraded used EV batteries, with too low capacity for on-road use but still perfectly adequate for stationary storage, where the energy/weight ratio is less critical.
In the 80's and 90's, when lead-acid batteries still ruled, some of the most popular EV conversion vehicles were compact pickups like the Ford Ranger and Chevy S-10. Ford even sold a production Ranger EV from 1998-2002. With the current popularity of pickup trucks, why is no one producing an electric pickup? How hard can it be?
Just like carbon capture, by the time they achieve useful power generation with fusion - if ever - there will be no need for it. Solar, wind and tidal generation with battery storage will be much cheaper and less polluting.
The average US household drives 20,000 miles a year. If all of that were electric, it would be roughly 6000 kWh per year, or about half the average total consumption of a US household. EVs will very soon be as convenient as gasoline cars and much cheaper overall to drive, so I would think adoption could happen quite rapidly and would sop up any excess electric power demand. It is a perfect match for solar energy because the cars can be charged anywhere anytime.
. . . . when they used to board beginning at the back of the plane? That at least made sense - you didn't have to crawl over people settling into the seats in the front. Now they still board by "zones", but it's not zones, it's nothing to do with zones, it's solely a question of status.
All self-playing video ads need to be blocked. Otherwise users are going to resort to 3rd party blockers. So many sites, including New York Times (which I pay for!) are practically unreadable without a blocker, due to animated ads.
..........that I grew up before era of smartphones and social media. I mean, I always knew I wasn't very popular, but at least I wasn't confronted with an unavoidable digital readout of my unpopularity hundreds of times a day.
France touts an end to its insignificant oil production. Meanwhile, Norway gloats about its aggressive renewable energy subsidies and emissions mandates, which are only made possible by the revenues from all the oil it produces for export.
The simple fact is that the essential quality control involved in scientific publication - vetting the scientific content and standardizing the presentation - is expensive to perform, and somebody has to pay for it. Traditionally, that work has been done by publishers who charge subscription fees for the service, and are periodically accused of price-gouging. Open-access journals which have attempted to bypass the commercial publishers have invariably discovered much to their dismay just how expensive it is. When they started, they predicted that vetting, copy-editing and maintaining an article online could easily be done for under $1000. But they now charge authors several thousand dollars to publish an article, money generally taken out of grant funds which otherwise would be used to support the actual research being reported. And still these open-access journals claim to be losing money. Is this a better system? I'm not so sure.
. . . before all this stuff started. I mean, I always knew I wasn't very popular, but at least I wasn't confronted with a real-time numerical readout of my unpopularity every minute of every day.
Probably the paperwork requirements are just BS, but simply putting obstacles in the path and making it more of a hassle to get these visas actually makes sense. In principle, you have to try to recruit US citizens first, but there are ways around that requirement. For example, you advertise an entry-level job with a low salary, reject applicants for not having some very specific job experience or skills, then hire a highly experienced overqualified foreigner at the same low salary. I'd be very surprised if it weren't true the in a majority of cases, H1-B holders were sought because they're younger and cheaper, not because they have special skills. What the government really ought to do is have an auction for these visas instead of a lottery, If Google, Microsoft et al. really need these people, they shouldn't mind paying $100,000 or more bounty to get them. Use the money to fund scholarships for US students in fields where there are supposedly such dire shortages, instead of saddling them with $100,000 of student debt.
When Tesla came on the scene I thought, what is this? What is point of making a $100,000 EV? You might sell a few to left-leaning celebs but the potential mass market for EVs is earthy, practical-minded former hippies like myself. What you need to make for us is a cheap vehicle to get from point A to point B without pollution, not a flashy status symbol. How wrong I was. Now mass-market EVs are plentiful, you can easily get a used one for under $10K, but the mass market itself has yet to materialize and Musk's high-end EVs still dominate. Seems my eco-friends are all buying gas Priuses instead. Of course it might be different if the big auto makers as well as the dealers hadn't fought EVs tooth-and-nail for so many years.
Since my R50 bought refurbished in 2004 and running an obsolete version of Lubuntu, suddenly won't play youtube videos anymore. Must be time to upgrade. Sure will miss that 4:3 screen though.
Unlike, say, MS-Office or Adobe Acrobat, no one is forced to use the Google search engine, for compatibility or any other reason. If users don't think it's showing them the best prices, they can use Bing or Yahoo or whatever. People use Google because it still gives the best search results. It's a free service after all, and if Google doesn't want to include comparison-shopping sites in the results, that should be its right. If Google were an EU-based company, it wouldn't be an issue.