This question lacks context. In terms of desktop PCs and common everyday usage, we don't NEED more speed or power. Nothing is going to speed up webpages or Facebook or whatever people typically do on their PCs. And even if you did, then you become constrained by the speed of the internet and there won't be much perceived benefit.
On the mobile side, there is room for more speed but it comes at the expense of power and is still constrained by connection speeds and website performance on mobile devices, which often sucks. Throwing faster and more processing isn't necessarily the fix that is needed.
There are cases where rendering and other heavy duty uses might benefit but the vast majority of people never use those things. Even gaming is usually constrained by other things like the GPU, the game engine, connection speed, and human performance.
The major places where computing power is much more important are in things like supercomputing but those machines don't run desktop programs and don't work the same way. Only the people directly using those machines would ever have any idea how fast they are or how much faster they wish they could be.
So, to recap, desktop PCs are adequate, mobile devices are still finding a balance between power and power usage, gamers are off on their own island but sheer CPU isn't a magic fix, and supercomputing, where extra power would matter, is so far removed from everyday users, there is no way to relate to it.
It's bad enough the school is doing this to their staff, but the school is ALSO charging students for curriculum which will prepare them to work the very same sort of jobs the school just outsourced.
So not only are they screwing their people, they're robbing their customers too and sending them into a dead end.
I'm not much of a protectionist. I think free trade is mostly a good thing. BUT I do think the US has a serious problem with H1-B and work visas in general. If you go to any other country, the process of getting in the country to work is MUCH MUCH harder. Canada, for example, will not allow someone in if they merely suspect the person is there to work and does not have a work visa and a sponsor. Even if they DO have a visa and a sponsor, the work in question has to be a job that NO Canadian can do. So if you take photos, for example, then you can't work there because clearly Canada has photographers who could do the work.
The US makes no such restrictions. You can come here and take the job of an American even if we have lots of other qualified Americans ready and able to do that work. We don't care. Bring on the foreigners! This is ridiculous.
So what you are really saying is that the sum of your experience and intelligence and education is measured in how efficient you can do a sort?
What if you used your intelligence and those other traits and abilities to do bigger and better things and just simply looked up how to do a sort? Aren't you yourself wasting your time dealing with trivial tasks of marginal impact, versus other things you could do?
I dunno. Just had an interview and IT company where I went in totally honest about my abilities and experience and so forth, and got past the phone interviews to come in and do a test on a demo system with full access to look stuff up.
And I failed, because every single bit of the test was stuff I TOLD them I had never done. I don't mind looking up things and trying to learn how to do stuff. But they knew my abilities and didn't test anything I knew OR my ability to solve problems even when I don't know. Nope. It was purely pass tests on stuff I knew nothing about.
Asshole company. I am kind of glad to not work there.
The driver is 100% right. Uber has set the fares so low, it is very hard to break even, much less make money. Under $3 to carry someone across town is not paying for anything. It's bullshit.
At the same time, they are onboarding hundreds of new drivers every single week in my city. So they have tons of drivers competing with tons of drivers and everybody is losing money on damn pool rides. The worst thing is these new drivers are lured in with Uber fuel cards and Uber car leases they can get, but the fact is, you have to pay Uber for all that shit first before you make a dime. So if you lease a car from them, you are in the hole for $200 or more a week, before you turn the key and burn gas and your time.
When I drove for Uber, it was very rare that I made $200 a week working 8 hours a day. The money wasn't there, once pool went live. So if I leased a car from Uber, I would owe my soul to the company store into infinity and not make a dime. My lawyer does bankruptcies and she says she sees tons of clueless Uber drivers who got into these leases promised a way to make them pay and then they find out there is NO way to make the lease payment and keep the car fueled, much less make any take home money.
As long as clueless new drivers show up with dollar signs in their eyes, Uber will be happy to put them on the roads and ensure neither the existing drivers nor the new ones make anything.
This will eventually fix the low fare issues as drivers just quit and new ones stop signing up. But then Uber will probably be entirely irrelevant anyway.
Right now, Uber still sends me messages begging me to hit the road and drive. Guarantees of $20-40 an hour for making ONE trip per given hour. All sorts of promotions promising to double my earnings if I recruit someone else to drive. Who pays for this? Investor cash. Watch it burnnnnn.
I would be tempted to drive for $20 to $40 an hour and make that one required trip, but I hate Uber so much at this point I don't give a shit. I am DONE driving for them. They can ripoff somebody else.
So I can still eat all the Slim Jims and beef jerky I want (which is a lot) but I have to give up my fire noodles and cup ramen?
Dammit.
Seriously, I am not sure how to take this. Instant noodles are hugely popular across asia, consumed in vast quantities every day, and yet asia still has low obesity rates. So is it the noodles that are the problem OR how the people respond to what they eat?
Or is it not the people as much as it is their gut bacteria?
Living where they do and eating what they have eaten for centuries has probably left them with a fairly specialized set of gut bacteria good at extracting maximum nutrition from meager food, and perhaps pasta and noodles are just the wrong thing for those people to eat. Perhaps their bodies are TOO good at retaining the calories from the food, because they had to be good to survive. Now, with caloric food in good supply, they no longer need that ability as much, but it's not like we can reprogram our guts.
They only reduce the speed if the cell you are in is saturated. If it's not, you get full speed. A lot of places do have underutilized cells so it may never throttle for some users.
I don't get why the hell they had to abbreviate qualifying. They had PLENTY of room for the whole actual word. Yet they chose to go to some effort to reduce it down to Qual'g which is not actually a version I'd ever seen before and had to stop for a second and think about what the hell they were trying to say. Qualcomm? Qualifying? Oh.
But they had all that room left! WHY T-Mobile!? WHY!
Guess I will stick with my Simply Prepaid service. Never had to qualify for it and it costs less per month anyway.
Teenage girls and boys don't TALK on phones any more. It is all Snapchat, Instagram, texting and Facetime.
Source: me. I have had chance to hang around multitudes of teenagers and young college kids. Nobody is using voice. Everybody is on Snapchat. Nobody uses Facebook. It's purely something their parents use, which means it is not cool and not for them. Everybody is on Instagram too.
Facebook will be the next MySpace in a few years: dead and forgotten. It's already dying from the bottom up with a lot of kids who will never begin to use Facebook at all.
Just started working in a famous fast food chain restaurant, where I USED to say they could automate the place and get rid of the employees.
But that was before I started working there and found out just how much goes on in the back to make sure you can get your double burger for a dollar. Namely, a LOT of cleaning. Pans, racks, bins, tools, huge cooker parts. All of it is greasy and gets filthy and has to be cleaned all the time. Putting in a robot to make burgers might be easy but who is going to pull out the grease bin and carefully dump it? Who is going to clean all the other grill parts and other crap?
Seriously, probably 70% of the effort spent on any food item is in the prep and clean before and after. Cooking and assembling the food is a small part.
They will have totally re engineer the restaurant to accommodate automated production. Every single part will need to be redesigned and tested. And it may still happen but not any time soon.
Many cities and towns have had ZERO regard for the wiring nightmare hanging over their streets. Not to mention trees and other hazards. UPS is a bunch of damn fools if they think they can simply put drones on trucks and go for it.
What do the drivers think? I read the UPS driver forums and they already had a lot of legitimate griefs and a lot of them felt overworked and pressured, so now they have to do drones, too? This is going to go over like a lead balloon in a gravity well.
Besides which, there are drone no-fly zones all over the place. The town where I live is completely off limits as we are too close to a major airport. But that's OK because there are tons of badly groomed trees and some of the worst telecom pole wiring I have ever seen. Phone, CATV, power, fiber, and above those lines are 100ft high voltage lines with at least three tiers. Even if there wasn't a flight ban here, you'd have to be a complete moron to try to fly a drone among all these wires and the trees. Forget the kite-eating tree. It has nothing on the ones around here. They don't just eat drones, they also thrown limbs at you. Seriously. They eject limbs from time to time.
There is no way Mars is going to support a self-sustaining colony. It will be at best an underground habitat but there are a lot of unknowns even in that, such as whether the Martian dust will prove to be dangerous to inhale or touch, or whether it can grow food. There is no way we can keep our people dust-free. They will be exposed. And if it turns out to foam in the lungs and kill them, that's a problem. We don't know.
Assuming the dust doesn't kill us, living in tunnels underground will be all there is going to be on Mars for a very long time. We have no known way of terraforming the planet, and even if we did, we'd have to fix the magnetic field problem or any air we managed to make would just escape into the solar wind. We have no known way to fix the magnetic field.
Making a colony on Mars is a whole lot of things we don't know how to do, and a lot of technology that's at least a few thousand years away.
We've already sent multiple Apollo missions around the moon, and several that landed, and numerous robot craft to land and circle the moon.
So what the fuck is the point of doing this again? We already did it. 50 years ago. It hasn't changed appreciably in that time and there is still nothing significant there that requires humans to be there to see or record or observe it. We have robots that can do the same things for far less money and risk, in far less time.
Jesus this is like spending a ton of money on a fancy new car so you can cruise around an empty mall parking lot, that we cruised around before. Oh look, the potholes are still the same. And how much did we spend to find that out?
NASA should focus on doing something new and different. Don't just waste the meager funds they barely get at all on repeating what has already been done.
Self driving cars aren't going to be terribly good at measuring road feel and that moment when you feel grip suddenly let go and make the correction to stay on the road.
Oh sure, the cars can measure it and graph it and log it, but they also need to respond instantly. Most of the AI driving stuff seems to assume the road will be a set geometry and properly marked and generally smooth and dry and clean. And roads are rarely like that.
All it would take to mess up AI racing is an oil slick or an animal or person or a tree falling or a part falling off another car or any number of other things for the AI to become overwhelmed.
When you send a package internationally, there are a lot more hands than just the USPS involved.
Shipper. Did they box and package it correctly? Did they understand how durable the package had to be? Point of origin postal service. In many countries, these operations are corrupt or prone to theft or delays. If the actual value was declared, that is a huge invite. Point of origin Customs service. Who knows what they may open or inspect or sample. Will they reseal it properly? Who knows. Shipper. Boat, airline, whatever. They toss it in with all the other mail. Hope it was packed correctly. Destination country Customs service. They will check it, may open it, inspect it, impose duties or fines, or confiscate it entirely. The item is not released back into the mail until Customs clears it. If they open the box, they are supposed to reseal it properly. Destination country Postal Service Who knows.
They do but their tracking system is about 20 years behind what competitors can do.
And if this was an international package, then the tracking data is first entered by the origin postal system and they have to properly hand off that data to the USPS or else it won't even show up in the US system. International tracking numbers also greatly increase the odds of wrong results or weird status updates.
In any case, a package this valuable should have been shipped another way. If it was PAL,probably DHL would be the carrier to use. Maybe UPS.
T-Mobile doesn't need to be contaminated with a wireless carrier STD, which is what Sprint is these days. Sure the booty may be cheap but you don't want it.
Taking some of Sprint's spectrum might be nice.
But T-Mobile seems to be doing well with the spectrum they have and the customers they have, and gain, every quarter. All T-Mobile has to do to be successful is stay on the path. Buying Sprint would take them off that path and put them on a new one where they have two networks to deal with and two probably very different customer bases and two sets of retail stores and all the other overlap. It is a huge risk to T-Mobile that this will derail their success and instead saddle them with Sprint's mess.
See what happened to Time Warner after it bought AOL. Two valued and successful companies now both worth a fraction of their prior values. They didn't sum. They subtracted.
A B-Complex supplement is a good idea anyway, as B vitamins get peed out and don't stay in the body for too long.
So it is really hard to end up with not enough of them over a very short period of time and minor changes in diet can mean missing out.
B-12 is also depleted by certain medications like Metformin, one of the main Type 2 Diabetes treatments. If you take Metformin, you are automatically low on B-12 and you will need to take more every day. You cannot eat enough food to reach the level you need.
Costco's Kirkland B-Complex is a very good one and packs more punch for less cost than other more common grocery store brands. But even with that, you would still need a B-12 standalone. Costco sells that too.
Google Fiber had been running gangbusters a year or two ago, with a nice Fiber Hut constructed in a hurry and drilling crews doing their thing down some major roads.
But after two years, the Fiber Hut is still dark. The work crews are gone. Nothing is getting drilled or installed or connected. Nobody has service. Which is fine, I guess, as the Google TV package is awful. Comcast's TV packages blow it away. And we are about to get Gigabit-like service from Comcast.
Really was hoping Google with their deep pockets might be the ones to make this happen. But it turns out they spent a lot for not a lot of results, and like many other Google projects, they will and do pull the plug and walk away.
Had high hopes for Project Fi too but I had to leave that because their pricing is just not competitive. $20 plus $10 a gig fails next to T-Mobile with $30 and 5 gigs. Same network.
The pricing is great. But It's Sprint (and I bet half the people who saw the OP said the same thing).
I had Project Fi for a while and loved having T-Mobile and Sprint networks, but I could tell instantly which network was active. There was a HUGE difference. And it wasn't because Sprint was better. Now I get service from TMO directly because their rate plans beat Project Fi by a mile and I don't need Sprint.
All of this is weird for me because I WAS a happy Sprint user for years. Had a voice line, smartphone (Palm Pre IIRC) and a USB data modem and it all worked beautifully. But that was on their CDMA network before the iPhone launched on Sprint. The DAY that product went live, the CDMA performance began to tank. WiMAX never worked worth a shit. Recall one afternoon in a parking lot about 1000 feet from one of their WiMAX towers and the mere act of rolling up my car window killed the signal. WiMAX was a disaster. Their LTE network came on line and it sucked too. I went to Verizon at that point and it was fine, of course.
But having gone from Verizon to Fi, I got to see how Sprint LTE had progressed and the answer is, hardly at all. It was still crap.
T-Mobile is working great. I'm not leaving. Not even if Sprint was free.
I used to be a stockholder in this company, before Hef threw a fit and took it private. Why did he do that? Because investors like me were telling him he was full of shit and his ideas sucked and it was costing the company money, all of which was true. He didn't like it. He took is bat and balls and went home.
The truth about Hef is that he ran the magazine with final editorial control and final say on EVERY business effort they made, worth mentioning, and he was well into senility by the end, making just awful decisions one after another.
One great example was the annual 'contest' the magazine and website held to have readers vote for PMOY. None of that shit mattered. Hef and Hef alone picked the winner and that's why for a long time they were all the same blondes, and why he had three of them at once as girlfriends. Hef didn't give a shit about the readers or the company. The decision to drop nudity was actually the first idea in decades that didn't come from Hef. Somebody else came up with it and Hef was so out of it, he waved it through.
Which was a disaster. Like most of Hefs ideas.
Cooper Hefner has a much sharper idea of what he wants to do and he gets what the reader wants. Um well, he gets the girls AND what the readers want to see. So maybe he will be able to make a miracle out of it.
Thanks to Hef, the company has spent decades ignoring massive IP they could have been monetizing, like the bunny girl costumes. That outfit is famous worldwide and isn't considered nearly as adult as the magazine. So why hasn't Playboy had their bunny girls everywhere? All they do license is the rabbit head logo, and then for shit like bad cologne sets and stickers. WTF.
I hope Cooper turns the merchandising around. I really do.
Workers at the company where I used to work told tales of the early days working there, when the company was new and flush with investor money and new clients coming in left and right and there were no products shipping. They had to code all of it, which wasn't terribly hard early on.
Anyway, the early employees spoke of being wined and dined all the time, catered food brought to the office all the time, and of receiving massive bonus checks for doing essentially nothing. They were raking in so much cash, they simply called it Stooopid Money and went nuts with it.
By the time I started there, the bonuses were all gone and the parking lot was full of luxury cars as each employee had tried to outdo each other. We still got catered lunches occasionally. That was all. Just sad whispers of how much they used to make in bonuses.
We use metro-ethernet, OC3'S, satellite, and microwave to deliver program feeds to transmitters. I don't know of any professionals who do it over the Internet. I would never do it under any circumstances. I have no sympathy for anyone dumb enough to try it.
These LPFM stations are run out of the back of groceterias and small restaurants. They don't have engineers or professionals. They got their license by mail order and the tower and transmitter out of boxes they might have got on eBay which came with a set of photocopied manuals in Chinese.
If it works when they give it internet connectivity, everybody is happy.
Still never seen one on anyone's arms, and I know a lot of geeky people with iPhones. Nobody has one of these watches or if they have, nobody talks about it or ever wears it. Anecdotal sure. But so far this success has been remarkably invisible.
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This question lacks context. In terms of desktop PCs and common everyday usage, we don't NEED more speed or power. Nothing is going to speed up webpages or Facebook or whatever people typically do on their PCs. And even if you did, then you become constrained by the speed of the internet and there won't be much perceived benefit.
On the mobile side, there is room for more speed but it comes at the expense of power and is still constrained by connection speeds and website performance on mobile devices, which often sucks. Throwing faster and more processing isn't necessarily the fix that is needed.
There are cases where rendering and other heavy duty uses might benefit but the vast majority of people never use those things. Even gaming is usually constrained by other things like the GPU, the game engine, connection speed, and human performance.
The major places where computing power is much more important are in things like supercomputing but those machines don't run desktop programs and don't work the same way. Only the people directly using those machines would ever have any idea how fast they are or how much faster they wish they could be.
So, to recap, desktop PCs are adequate, mobile devices are still finding a balance between power and power usage, gamers are off on their own island but sheer CPU isn't a magic fix, and supercomputing, where extra power would matter, is so far removed from everyday users, there is no way to relate to it.
It's bad enough the school is doing this to their staff, but the school is ALSO charging students for curriculum which will prepare them to work the very same sort of jobs the school just outsourced.
So not only are they screwing their people, they're robbing their customers too and sending them into a dead end.
I'm not much of a protectionist. I think free trade is mostly a good thing. BUT I do think the US has a serious problem with H1-B and work visas in general. If you go to any other country, the process of getting in the country to work is MUCH MUCH harder. Canada, for example, will not allow someone in if they merely suspect the person is there to work and does not have a work visa and a sponsor. Even if they DO have a visa and a sponsor, the work in question has to be a job that NO Canadian can do. So if you take photos, for example, then you can't work there because clearly Canada has photographers who could do the work.
The US makes no such restrictions. You can come here and take the job of an American even if we have lots of other qualified Americans ready and able to do that work. We don't care. Bring on the foreigners! This is ridiculous.
So what you are really saying is that the sum of your experience and intelligence and education is measured in how efficient you can do a sort?
What if you used your intelligence and those other traits and abilities to do bigger and better things and just simply looked up how to do a sort? Aren't you yourself wasting your time dealing with trivial tasks of marginal impact, versus other things you could do?
I dunno. Just had an interview and IT company where I went in totally honest about my abilities and experience and so forth, and got past the phone interviews to come in and do a test on a demo system with full access to look stuff up.
And I failed, because every single bit of the test was stuff I TOLD them I had never done. I don't mind looking up things and trying to learn how to do stuff. But they knew my abilities and didn't test anything I knew OR my ability to solve problems even when I don't know. Nope. It was purely pass tests on stuff I knew nothing about.
Asshole company. I am kind of glad to not work there.
The driver is 100% right. Uber has set the fares so low, it is very hard to break even, much less make money. Under $3 to carry someone across town is not paying for anything. It's bullshit.
At the same time, they are onboarding hundreds of new drivers every single week in my city. So they have tons of drivers competing with tons of drivers and everybody is losing money on damn pool rides. The worst thing is these new drivers are lured in with Uber fuel cards and Uber car leases they can get, but the fact is, you have to pay Uber for all that shit first before you make a dime. So if you lease a car from them, you are in the hole for $200 or more a week, before you turn the key and burn gas and your time.
When I drove for Uber, it was very rare that I made $200 a week working 8 hours a day. The money wasn't there, once pool went live. So if I leased a car from Uber, I would owe my soul to the company store into infinity and not make a dime. My lawyer does bankruptcies and she says she sees tons of clueless Uber drivers who got into these leases promised a way to make them pay and then they find out there is NO way to make the lease payment and keep the car fueled, much less make any take home money.
As long as clueless new drivers show up with dollar signs in their eyes, Uber will be happy to put them on the roads and ensure neither the existing drivers nor the new ones make anything.
This will eventually fix the low fare issues as drivers just quit and new ones stop signing up. But then Uber will probably be entirely irrelevant anyway.
Right now, Uber still sends me messages begging me to hit the road and drive. Guarantees of $20-40 an hour for making ONE trip per given hour. All sorts of promotions promising to double my earnings if I recruit someone else to drive. Who pays for this? Investor cash. Watch it burnnnnn.
I would be tempted to drive for $20 to $40 an hour and make that one required trip, but I hate Uber so much at this point I don't give a shit. I am DONE driving for them. They can ripoff somebody else.
Soda doesn't deserve to be maligned. Plain soda water has zero calories and doesn't cause anything but needing to go pee later.
It's the flavorings and additives that are the actual issue. Yet plain seltzer water is lumped in with all the others. Stupid.
So I can still eat all the Slim Jims and beef jerky I want (which is a lot) but I have to give up my fire noodles and cup ramen?
Dammit.
Seriously, I am not sure how to take this. Instant noodles are hugely popular across asia, consumed in vast quantities every day, and yet asia still has low obesity rates. So is it the noodles that are the problem OR how the people respond to what they eat?
Or is it not the people as much as it is their gut bacteria?
Living where they do and eating what they have eaten for centuries has probably left them with a fairly specialized set of gut bacteria good at extracting maximum nutrition from meager food, and perhaps pasta and noodles are just the wrong thing for those people to eat. Perhaps their bodies are TOO good at retaining the calories from the food, because they had to be good to survive. Now, with caloric food in good supply, they no longer need that ability as much, but it's not like we can reprogram our guts.
They only reduce the speed if the cell you are in is saturated. If it's not, you get full speed. A lot of places do have underutilized cells so it may never throttle for some users.
I don't get why the hell they had to abbreviate qualifying. They had PLENTY of room for the whole actual word. Yet they chose to go to some effort to reduce it down to Qual'g which is not actually a version I'd ever seen before and had to stop for a second and think about what the hell they were trying to say. Qualcomm? Qualifying? Oh.
But they had all that room left! WHY T-Mobile!? WHY!
Guess I will stick with my Simply Prepaid service. Never had to qualify for it and it costs less per month anyway.
Teenage girls and boys don't TALK on phones any more. It is all Snapchat, Instagram, texting and Facetime.
Source: me. I have had chance to hang around multitudes of teenagers and young college kids. Nobody is using voice. Everybody is on Snapchat. Nobody uses Facebook. It's purely something their parents use, which means it is not cool and not for them. Everybody is on Instagram too.
Facebook will be the next MySpace in a few years: dead and forgotten. It's already dying from the bottom up with a lot of kids who will never begin to use Facebook at all.
Just started working in a famous fast food chain restaurant, where I USED to say they could automate the place and get rid of the employees.
But that was before I started working there and found out just how much goes on in the back to make sure you can get your double burger for a dollar. Namely, a LOT of cleaning. Pans, racks, bins, tools, huge cooker parts. All of it is greasy and gets filthy and has to be cleaned all the time. Putting in a robot to make burgers might be easy but who is going to pull out the grease bin and carefully dump it? Who is going to clean all the other grill parts and other crap?
Seriously, probably 70% of the effort spent on any food item is in the prep and clean before and after. Cooking and assembling the food is a small part.
They will have totally re engineer the restaurant to accommodate automated production. Every single part will need to be redesigned and tested. And it may still happen but not any time soon.
Many cities and towns have had ZERO regard for the wiring nightmare hanging over their streets. Not to mention trees and other hazards. UPS is a bunch of damn fools if they think they can simply put drones on trucks and go for it.
What do the drivers think? I read the UPS driver forums and they already had a lot of legitimate griefs and a lot of them felt overworked and pressured, so now they have to do drones, too? This is going to go over like a lead balloon in a gravity well.
Besides which, there are drone no-fly zones all over the place. The town where I live is completely off limits as we are too close to a major airport. But that's OK because there are tons of badly groomed trees and some of the worst telecom pole wiring I have ever seen. Phone, CATV, power, fiber, and above those lines are 100ft high voltage lines with at least three tiers. Even if there wasn't a flight ban here, you'd have to be a complete moron to try to fly a drone among all these wires and the trees. Forget the kite-eating tree. It has nothing on the ones around here. They don't just eat drones, they also thrown limbs at you. Seriously. They eject limbs from time to time.
There is no way Mars is going to support a self-sustaining colony. It will be at best an underground habitat but there are a lot of unknowns even in that, such as whether the Martian dust will prove to be dangerous to inhale or touch, or whether it can grow food. There is no way we can keep our people dust-free. They will be exposed. And if it turns out to foam in the lungs and kill them, that's a problem. We don't know.
Assuming the dust doesn't kill us, living in tunnels underground will be all there is going to be on Mars for a very long time. We have no known way of terraforming the planet, and even if we did, we'd have to fix the magnetic field problem or any air we managed to make would just escape into the solar wind. We have no known way to fix the magnetic field.
Making a colony on Mars is a whole lot of things we don't know how to do, and a lot of technology that's at least a few thousand years away.
We've already sent multiple Apollo missions around the moon, and several that landed, and numerous robot craft to land and circle the moon.
So what the fuck is the point of doing this again? We already did it. 50 years ago. It hasn't changed appreciably in that time and there is still nothing significant there that requires humans to be there to see or record or observe it. We have robots that can do the same things for far less money and risk, in far less time.
Jesus this is like spending a ton of money on a fancy new car so you can cruise around an empty mall parking lot, that we cruised around before. Oh look, the potholes are still the same. And how much did we spend to find that out?
NASA should focus on doing something new and different. Don't just waste the meager funds they barely get at all on repeating what has already been done.
Self driving cars aren't going to be terribly good at measuring road feel and that moment when you feel grip suddenly let go and make the correction to stay on the road.
Oh sure, the cars can measure it and graph it and log it, but they also need to respond instantly. Most of the AI driving stuff seems to assume the road will be a set geometry and properly marked and generally smooth and dry and clean. And roads are rarely like that.
All it would take to mess up AI racing is an oil slick or an animal or person or a tree falling or a part falling off another car or any number of other things for the AI to become overwhelmed.
When you send a package internationally, there are a lot more hands than just the USPS involved.
Shipper. Did they box and package it correctly? Did they understand how durable the package had to be?
Point of origin postal service. In many countries, these operations are corrupt or prone to theft or delays. If the actual value was declared, that is a huge invite.
Point of origin Customs service. Who knows what they may open or inspect or sample. Will they reseal it properly? Who knows.
Shipper. Boat, airline, whatever. They toss it in with all the other mail. Hope it was packed correctly.
Destination country Customs service. They will check it, may open it, inspect it, impose duties or fines, or confiscate it entirely. The item is not released back into the mail until Customs clears it. If they open the box, they are supposed to reseal it properly.
Destination country Postal Service Who knows.
They do but their tracking system is about 20 years behind what competitors can do.
And if this was an international package, then the tracking data is first entered by the origin postal system and they have to properly hand off that data to the USPS or else it won't even show up in the US system. International tracking numbers also greatly increase the odds of wrong results or weird status updates.
In any case, a package this valuable should have been shipped another way. If it was PAL,probably DHL would be the carrier to use. Maybe UPS.
T-Mobile doesn't need to be contaminated with a wireless carrier STD, which is what Sprint is these days. Sure the booty may be cheap but you don't want it.
Taking some of Sprint's spectrum might be nice.
But T-Mobile seems to be doing well with the spectrum they have and the customers they have, and gain, every quarter. All T-Mobile has to do to be successful is stay on the path. Buying Sprint would take them off that path and put them on a new one where they have two networks to deal with and two probably very different customer bases and two sets of retail stores and all the other overlap. It is a huge risk to T-Mobile that this will derail their success and instead saddle them with Sprint's mess.
See what happened to Time Warner after it bought AOL. Two valued and successful companies now both worth a fraction of their prior values. They didn't sum. They subtracted.
A B-Complex supplement is a good idea anyway, as B vitamins get peed out and don't stay in the body for too long.
So it is really hard to end up with not enough of them over a very short period of time and minor changes in diet can mean missing out.
B-12 is also depleted by certain medications like Metformin, one of the main Type 2 Diabetes treatments. If you take Metformin, you are automatically low on B-12 and you will need to take more every day. You cannot eat enough food to reach the level you need.
Costco's Kirkland B-Complex is a very good one and packs more punch for less cost than other more common grocery store brands. But even with that, you would still need a B-12 standalone. Costco sells that too.
Google Fiber had been running gangbusters a year or two ago, with a nice Fiber Hut constructed in a hurry and drilling crews doing their thing down some major roads.
But after two years, the Fiber Hut is still dark. The work crews are gone. Nothing is getting drilled or installed or connected. Nobody has service. Which is fine, I guess, as the Google TV package is awful. Comcast's TV packages blow it away. And we are about to get Gigabit-like service from Comcast.
Really was hoping Google with their deep pockets might be the ones to make this happen. But it turns out they spent a lot for not a lot of results, and like many other Google projects, they will and do pull the plug and walk away.
Had high hopes for Project Fi too but I had to leave that because their pricing is just not competitive. $20 plus $10 a gig fails next to T-Mobile with $30 and 5 gigs. Same network.
The pricing is great. But It's Sprint (and I bet half the people who saw the OP said the same thing).
I had Project Fi for a while and loved having T-Mobile and Sprint networks, but I could tell instantly which network was active. There was a HUGE difference. And it wasn't because Sprint was better. Now I get service from TMO directly because their rate plans beat Project Fi by a mile and I don't need Sprint.
All of this is weird for me because I WAS a happy Sprint user for years. Had a voice line, smartphone (Palm Pre IIRC) and a USB data modem and it all worked beautifully. But that was on their CDMA network before the iPhone launched on Sprint. The DAY that product went live, the CDMA performance began to tank. WiMAX never worked worth a shit. Recall one afternoon in a parking lot about 1000 feet from one of their WiMAX towers and the mere act of rolling up my car window killed the signal. WiMAX was a disaster. Their LTE network came on line and it sucked too. I went to Verizon at that point and it was fine, of course.
But having gone from Verizon to Fi, I got to see how Sprint LTE had progressed and the answer is, hardly at all. It was still crap.
T-Mobile is working great. I'm not leaving. Not even if Sprint was free.
I used to be a stockholder in this company, before Hef threw a fit and took it private. Why did he do that? Because investors like me were telling him he was full of shit and his ideas sucked and it was costing the company money, all of which was true. He didn't like it. He took is bat and balls and went home.
The truth about Hef is that he ran the magazine with final editorial control and final say on EVERY business effort they made, worth mentioning, and he was well into senility by the end, making just awful decisions one after another.
One great example was the annual 'contest' the magazine and website held to have readers vote for PMOY. None of that shit mattered. Hef and Hef alone picked the winner and that's why for a long time they were all the same blondes, and why he had three of them at once as girlfriends. Hef didn't give a shit about the readers or the company. The decision to drop nudity was actually the first idea in decades that didn't come from Hef. Somebody else came up with it and Hef was so out of it, he waved it through.
Which was a disaster. Like most of Hefs ideas.
Cooper Hefner has a much sharper idea of what he wants to do and he gets what the reader wants. Um well, he gets the girls AND what the readers want to see. So maybe he will be able to make a miracle out of it.
Thanks to Hef, the company has spent decades ignoring massive IP they could have been monetizing, like the bunny girl costumes. That outfit is famous worldwide and isn't considered nearly as adult as the magazine. So why hasn't Playboy had their bunny girls everywhere? All they do license is the rabbit head logo, and then for shit like bad cologne sets and stickers. WTF.
I hope Cooper turns the merchandising around. I really do.
Workers at the company where I used to work told tales of the early days working there, when the company was new and flush with investor money and new clients coming in left and right and there were no products shipping. They had to code all of it, which wasn't terribly hard early on.
Anyway, the early employees spoke of being wined and dined all the time, catered food brought to the office all the time, and of receiving massive bonus checks for doing essentially nothing. They were raking in so much cash, they simply called it Stooopid Money and went nuts with it.
By the time I started there, the bonuses were all gone and the parking lot was full of luxury cars as each employee had tried to outdo each other. We still got catered lunches occasionally. That was all. Just sad whispers of how much they used to make in bonuses.
We use metro-ethernet, OC3'S, satellite, and microwave to deliver program feeds to transmitters. I don't know of any professionals who do it over the Internet. I would never do it under any circumstances. I have no sympathy for anyone dumb enough to try it.
These LPFM stations are run out of the back of groceterias and small restaurants. They don't have engineers or professionals. They got their license by mail order and the tower and transmitter out of boxes they might have got on eBay which came with a set of photocopied manuals in Chinese.
If it works when they give it internet connectivity, everybody is happy.
Still never seen one on anyone's arms, and I know a lot of geeky people with iPhones. Nobody has one of these watches or if they have, nobody talks about it or ever wears it. Anecdotal sure. But so far this success has been remarkably invisible.