A minor quibble, but most hotel internet has been pretty poor in my experience, often to the point of being almost unusable, especially in the evenings and early mornings when everyone is using it.
Because it's a password, and last I checked, banks do not take responsibility for transactions that involved the PIN. They consider it the consumer's responsibility to maintain the secrecy of their PIN, regardless of it's weakness. As a result, the banks have relatively little exposure to PIN based attacks, and therefore have little incentive to spend any money making it more secure.
They are also abstracted from the time-frames that it took to come up with those big ideas in the past. They read a history book and see "soandso invented suchandsuch" and think, gosh, if it was only that easy. Except it wasn't that easy. Soandso was building up the research of others that was prevalent at the time, and he spent many years coming up with excruciatingly iterative steps to get to where he ended up. Much of the public, who doesn't follow all those iterative steps gets a light bulb one day, and thinks it's amazing, but wasn't privy to the years of research and the number of people behind it.
The PBS special "Absolute Zero" is a good look at a start to almost finished look at discovery and invention. The chart here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/milestones-in-cold-research.html shows the major milestones, note the time between those milestones are many years apart. It sounds a lot more thrilling when you can read all the discoveries in 20 minutes out of a history book.
You'd almost certainly need at least some battery power between the generator and the drive-train. The battery would handle temporary spikes in power (acceleration), etc. It would also allow you to run the laser for the 30 seconds required to get the reaction going.
Wholesale raping of the rich to feed the poor? Well, I'm convinced, I should feel terrible for the rich, seeing as we have some the largest disparities in income in modern history and one of the lowest marginal tax rates. They are truly being raped.
Let's stop the thread here. The USSR founding fathers were hiding behind a veneer of support for the working class, while themselves being rich aristocracy who liked their power and opulence. That wasn't communism, it was fascism parading as communism.
I believe the NHL will blackout streaming if the game is offered in your local area via cable or network. i.e. It's great for a Hawks fan who lives in LA now, but for the Flyers fan who is in the broadcast area of his team, he's screwed.
The problem is that it will likely hit a larger segment of the economy. People are excited about Facebook, et al. If they see the valuations for these companies plummet, they are likely to get a little more bearish about their other investments, at least in the short-term. The snowball effects tend to leave a lot of people hurting. The only people who will make money are the full-time investors who squeeze money out of volatility.
It wouldn't be the craziest thing for them to get into though. With the user base they have, spinning off a financial arm and providing banking services to users who are on the site anyway could start to turn Facebook into a one-stop portal, and give them a huge revenue stream...
US courts won't hold the owner of the vehicle responsible unless the owner knew there was something wrong and it would be considered reasonable that the owner should have prevented the accident. The manufacturer of the vehicle would be more likely to be held liable, but they'd have to be shown negligent. A more sane solution would be for the government to take a role in this. It's in the nations best interest to prevent 35k deaths a year from auto-accidents. They could handle payouts to victims or create a non-profit that would handle it and pay for it either through a surcharge placed on such vehicles or a surcharge placed on auto-insurance. This would avoid forcing victims, who are likely not to have a lot of money, to have to go up against the legal teams of large auto manufacturers.
You may have to accept personal liability for any accident you are involved in if you are manually driving a car once this technology become more commonplace. That could be a very steep price to pay. You'll also likely have increased insurance rates as your risk relative to the drivers who use the technology will be higher.
The difference is that coal doesn't kill all at once. Humans are really terrible at optimizing against high profile risks. They are terrible at optimizing against long-term or delayed reaction risks. For example, how much money has the US spent fighting terrorism in the last 10 years? How many people has terrorism killed in the US in the last 10 years? Compare that to the amount of money we've spent on any number of other endeavors like cancer/diabetes/heart disease/automotive safety research.
That may be true for this guy, in this market, at this time. And yes, many more ebooks will be sold when books are priced at 99 cents. But, the road is not all gold and riches for all writers who price their books at 99 cents. This guy is a novelty and he stands out for his low price. Think of the app store, when everything, or at least most things become 99 cents, it's much more difficult to stand out and get the critical mass needed to bring in those sales.
The points of coming in below the pain point and impulse buy are well received, and more books will be sold, but other authors entering the space are going to cannibalize his sales. The increase in sales will hit a ceiling for the 99 cent market as a whole, and then they'll be back to slogging it out against one another. All the better for us the consumer though.
Punishing corporations is to encourage corporations to enact policies across the board that prevent these kinds of abuses from happening. But make no mistake, when it can be proven, knowingly causing harm or fraud is personally punishable, as can be evidenced by several Enron execs in prison. The fact that investigators aren't more vociferous about finding and personally punishing individuals for malfeasance is a matter of public policy. Write your senators and congressmen.
It's a question of scale. Reimaging a PC is almost always more economical than finding the root cause, unless it's very repetitive, assuming a proper backup solution is in place. It's a different beast when the computer in question is mission critical and the client can't accept a random downtime every few weeks while you rebuild.
There are a lot of cases where pressing the button means that the problem will go away...for a few weeks. It will work right until you hit the same conditions that caused the problem in the first place. Suddenly, your using the refresh to cover up either a poor implementation, or a standing bug, and it isn't going to go away until you call that guy in suspenders.
This sounds very similar to the boarding pass system being used at some airports. They send you a copy of a barcode which acts as your boarding pass. The only trouble I ever had was with a blackberry screen not being big enough for the scanner to pick it up. After I got a Droid, I preferred the digital pass to finding a printer every time I needed a boarding pass.
Likewise, this may be a nice way to manage one's coffee addiction. The only problem is that seeing all your past purchases might not be good for Starbucks. People may finally realize how much money they're spending.
How much new technology do you think you could keep up with if you had an additional 10 hours a week to dedicate to studying new tech? Further, how much more money do you think you could make being up to date, or more skilled in a specific area? It can often be enough to hire people to do some of the tasks that would account for those additional 10 hours a week. That includes house cleaning, yard maintenance, auto maintenance, laundry, etc. The bonus is that I get 10 hours to do something relatively fun (play with new tech) rather than something relatively mundane (iron shirts).
I agree with this. But, whereas Microsoft was hoping to have multiple PCs per household, the rise of tablets and smart phones will likely erode that market. You suddenly only need one PC for little Jan to write her papers, rather than mom, dad and Jane all sitting down with their own laptop.
I'm certainly glad that the "big-brained academics" that came up with the telegraph didn't decide that the existing communication infrastructure was good enough. Nor the "big-brained academics" who invented the telephone. Nor the "big-brained academics" who invented computer networking and the internet. People have crazy ideas. They work on these ideas and come up with proposals. Many of these ideas won't work. Many of them are crazy. Often, it's the crazy ideas that are the best, and the most world-changing. But if we killed every project that doesn't have an immediate implementation plan, we'd have killed a large amount of all the research we've ever done. The kind of research that led to almost all the technologies we have today.
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A minor quibble, but most hotel internet has been pretty poor in my experience, often to the point of being almost unusable, especially in the evenings and early mornings when everyone is using it.
Because it's a password, and last I checked, banks do not take responsibility for transactions that involved the PIN. They consider it the consumer's responsibility to maintain the secrecy of their PIN, regardless of it's weakness. As a result, the banks have relatively little exposure to PIN based attacks, and therefore have little incentive to spend any money making it more secure.
They are also abstracted from the time-frames that it took to come up with those big ideas in the past. They read a history book and see "soandso invented suchandsuch" and think, gosh, if it was only that easy. Except it wasn't that easy. Soandso was building up the research of others that was prevalent at the time, and he spent many years coming up with excruciatingly iterative steps to get to where he ended up. Much of the public, who doesn't follow all those iterative steps gets a light bulb one day, and thinks it's amazing, but wasn't privy to the years of research and the number of people behind it.
The PBS special "Absolute Zero" is a good look at a start to almost finished look at discovery and invention. The chart here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/milestones-in-cold-research.html shows the major milestones, note the time between those milestones are many years apart. It sounds a lot more thrilling when you can read all the discoveries in 20 minutes out of a history book.
You'd almost certainly need at least some battery power between the generator and the drive-train. The battery would handle temporary spikes in power (acceleration), etc. It would also allow you to run the laser for the 30 seconds required to get the reaction going.
Wholesale raping of the rich to feed the poor? Well, I'm convinced, I should feel terrible for the rich, seeing as we have some the largest disparities in income in modern history and one of the lowest marginal tax rates. They are truly being raped.
Let's stop the thread here. The USSR founding fathers were hiding behind a veneer of support for the working class, while themselves being rich aristocracy who liked their power and opulence. That wasn't communism, it was fascism parading as communism.
Him being shot in the face kind of makes any further torture a bit moot.
I believe the NHL will blackout streaming if the game is offered in your local area via cable or network. i.e. It's great for a Hawks fan who lives in LA now, but for the Flyers fan who is in the broadcast area of his team, he's screwed.
The problem is that it will likely hit a larger segment of the economy. People are excited about Facebook, et al. If they see the valuations for these companies plummet, they are likely to get a little more bearish about their other investments, at least in the short-term. The snowball effects tend to leave a lot of people hurting. The only people who will make money are the full-time investors who squeeze money out of volatility.
It wouldn't be the craziest thing for them to get into though. With the user base they have, spinning off a financial arm and providing banking services to users who are on the site anyway could start to turn Facebook into a one-stop portal, and give them a huge revenue stream...
US courts won't hold the owner of the vehicle responsible unless the owner knew there was something wrong and it would be considered reasonable that the owner should have prevented the accident. The manufacturer of the vehicle would be more likely to be held liable, but they'd have to be shown negligent. A more sane solution would be for the government to take a role in this. It's in the nations best interest to prevent 35k deaths a year from auto-accidents. They could handle payouts to victims or create a non-profit that would handle it and pay for it either through a surcharge placed on such vehicles or a surcharge placed on auto-insurance. This would avoid forcing victims, who are likely not to have a lot of money, to have to go up against the legal teams of large auto manufacturers.
You may have to accept personal liability for any accident you are involved in if you are manually driving a car once this technology become more commonplace. That could be a very steep price to pay. You'll also likely have increased insurance rates as your risk relative to the drivers who use the technology will be higher.
The difference is that coal doesn't kill all at once. Humans are really terrible at optimizing against high profile risks. They are terrible at optimizing against long-term or delayed reaction risks. For example, how much money has the US spent fighting terrorism in the last 10 years? How many people has terrorism killed in the US in the last 10 years? Compare that to the amount of money we've spent on any number of other endeavors like cancer/diabetes/heart disease/automotive safety research.
That may be true for this guy, in this market, at this time. And yes, many more ebooks will be sold when books are priced at 99 cents. But, the road is not all gold and riches for all writers who price their books at 99 cents. This guy is a novelty and he stands out for his low price. Think of the app store, when everything, or at least most things become 99 cents, it's much more difficult to stand out and get the critical mass needed to bring in those sales.
The points of coming in below the pain point and impulse buy are well received, and more books will be sold, but other authors entering the space are going to cannibalize his sales. The increase in sales will hit a ceiling for the 99 cent market as a whole, and then they'll be back to slogging it out against one another. All the better for us the consumer though.
The eco-drive isn't powering a small bluetooth router.
Punishing corporations is to encourage corporations to enact policies across the board that prevent these kinds of abuses from happening. But make no mistake, when it can be proven, knowingly causing harm or fraud is personally punishable, as can be evidenced by several Enron execs in prison. The fact that investigators aren't more vociferous about finding and personally punishing individuals for malfeasance is a matter of public policy. Write your senators and congressmen.
It's a question of scale. Reimaging a PC is almost always more economical than finding the root cause, unless it's very repetitive, assuming a proper backup solution is in place. It's a different beast when the computer in question is mission critical and the client can't accept a random downtime every few weeks while you rebuild.
Sounds like a cluster...
There are a lot of cases where pressing the button means that the problem will go away...for a few weeks. It will work right until you hit the same conditions that caused the problem in the first place. Suddenly, your using the refresh to cover up either a poor implementation, or a standing bug, and it isn't going to go away until you call that guy in suspenders.
The former mayor of Detroit, now a convict, Kwame Kilpatrick begs to differ:
http://www.slate.com/id/2183399/
This sounds very similar to the boarding pass system being used at some airports. They send you a copy of a barcode which acts as your boarding pass. The only trouble I ever had was with a blackberry screen not being big enough for the scanner to pick it up. After I got a Droid, I preferred the digital pass to finding a printer every time I needed a boarding pass.
Likewise, this may be a nice way to manage one's coffee addiction. The only problem is that seeing all your past purchases might not be good for Starbucks. People may finally realize how much money they're spending.
How much new technology do you think you could keep up with if you had an additional 10 hours a week to dedicate to studying new tech? Further, how much more money do you think you could make being up to date, or more skilled in a specific area? It can often be enough to hire people to do some of the tasks that would account for those additional 10 hours a week. That includes house cleaning, yard maintenance, auto maintenance, laundry, etc. The bonus is that I get 10 hours to do something relatively fun (play with new tech) rather than something relatively mundane (iron shirts).
I agree with this. But, whereas Microsoft was hoping to have multiple PCs per household, the rise of tablets and smart phones will likely erode that market. You suddenly only need one PC for little Jan to write her papers, rather than mom, dad and Jane all sitting down with their own laptop.
I'm certainly glad that the "big-brained academics" that came up with the telegraph didn't decide that the existing communication infrastructure was good enough. Nor the "big-brained academics" who invented the telephone. Nor the "big-brained academics" who invented computer networking and the internet. People have crazy ideas. They work on these ideas and come up with proposals. Many of these ideas won't work. Many of them are crazy. Often, it's the crazy ideas that are the best, and the most world-changing. But if we killed every project that doesn't have an immediate implementation plan, we'd have killed a large amount of all the research we've ever done. The kind of research that led to almost all the technologies we have today.
Apparently your wife isn't a slashdot reader :)