Obviously, you want a self-driving car to have the best possible auto-pilot technology you can put into it. But purposeful attempts to trick it into not detecting objects, or into thinking objects are there that aren't really there? That means nothing, IMO. What matters is that it does a reliable job of these things in real-world situations where nobody is TRYING to fool the system.
Human drivers see things all the time and misinterpret them. (There's that popular photo going around social media where someone painted a tunnel on the side of a concrete wall and a car tried to drive off the road, into it, for example. And certainly, people have reported mirages ahead of them on roads for decades.)
Actually, I don't think you're talking about something equivalent, even though I know what you're saying. (I have Comcast too, and my set top box also has a FireWire port on the back of it.)
The thing is though? In order to download the files on your DVR to your computer, you'd still have to do all of that via the hardware Comcast provided you -- meaning you'd also presumably only have access to content that you were paying your monthly subscription for in the first place. (I remember when people first discovered that ability to connect some of the digital set-top boxes to computers via FireWire, the whole "piracy" thing was a hot topic. But it quickly settled back down when people realized it was just a digital version of exactly what you could always do with a VCR or DVDR connected through a different set of connectors.)
I think what the cable providers don't like with the current FCC proposal is the idea that they lose direct control over what the set-top boxes do that decode their programming. For example... What if someone designed a digital set top box that worked the way the Plex media server works on a computer, where you can share your content with other users? One person could pay for a Showtime or HBO subscription, record a bunch of shows to a DVR built into such a box, and then allow any of their "friends" to stream the content to their own box of the same make/model, regardless of what their personal cable package contained in it.
I was with you until you started in with that "White people get hours and tear-gas. Black people get bullets." stuff. Actually, white people get killed for the same kind of thing by cops, but black people get news coverage and white people get media silence. So unless you dig a little deeper to follow such things, you wouldn't realize it.
That whole argument of a need to "account for externalities" is questionable, IMO.
It sounds like a rational argument for carbon taxes and the like, with that explanation that the free marketplace failed to account for those things, so it fills in that gap.
But traditionally, these "external factors" were never accounted for, because they involve basic resources on the planet that are accessible and shared by everyone, and essentially viewed as "free". I'm not sure that there's really any way to calculate the correct "cost" of using any of them that isn't biased towards certain individuals?
I mean, should we start applying a tax to everyone who grows crops or a garden for "soil nutrient depletion"? Once you start with the concept, where does it end? I think you'd have to logically extend it to all sorts of things.... (Heck, they tried this up here in Maryland, with a "rain tax" that made you pay based on how much impermeable surface you owned on your land. The argument was, you were negatively impacting the environment if the rain water couldn't soak into the ground in any place you constructed something or paved over some soil, so you needed to pay compensation for doing it. It was VERY unpopular and got repealed.)
With ANY of these situations, there's no agreement on what you're really costing "future generations" by taking actions that manipulate the environment around you. I think the free marketplace handles this by letting people deal with any consequences as they arise and impede progress. Maybe that's more "reactionary" than you'd ideally like? But it ensures we aren't duped into wasting huge sums of money on false solutions to problems. If we took all the fossil fuels offline right now, we'd lose so much energy generation capacity, it would put us in a really bad position to move forward to solve the climate change issues.
From the very first post on here in response to the article, you had someone on a rant about the economy hurting Millennials so much, they simply can't afford to have sex anymore.
Just based on history, that's a hugely flawed assumption because it's most often the very poor who wind up having a lot of sex and consequently, the most kids. When you don't have the money to find other ways to keep entertained or busy, sex is often the "trusty fallback" to escape the world for a little while. And even if you wind up having a kid, at least the kid is seen a valuable possession or gift, in a world where you don't have much of value.
The man doesn't speak for *many* who traditionally aligned themselves as "Republican". (That's why you have the party imploding, and why it already split with the "Tea Party Republicans".)
Whether or not Trump gets elected to office, I think the party is pretty much done for. The only way it's getting salvaged is if a lot of the people who got disgusted with it and walked away, combined with the more "Centrist" or Libertarian members get together and revamp it.
When you talk to many of THOSE Republicans, they're not a fan of proposals like Obama's and Mrs. Clinton's attempts to end the coal industry -- but not because they deny climate change exists. They simply believe (as do I, actually) that the change needs to happen on its own -- not via government mandate/force. Because for one thing, you otherwise create a lot of collateral damage to our economy. Don't forget, for example, that our freight rail system transports more coal than almost anything else. If you eliminate the coal industry right now, you may as well also kill freight rail while you're at it. And THAT doesn't seem like a very environmentally sound move, since everything else carried by rail today would have to go by individual trucks instead. Plus, it puts the remaining coal miners out of work as well as the railroad workers. Those are two industries where you don't need a lot of formal education to earn a paycheck that can sustain a family. What's the plan for all of those displaced workers? Tell them all to become solar panel installers?!
IMO, what's not really very realistic is the posturing and "scare tactics" going on with climate change, that we must make drastic changes NOW or else risk dire consequences. In reality, the whole thing won't suddenly reverse itself after 200+ years of burning fossil fuels worldwide, just because in 2017, we mandate an end to much of it. The move to more environmentally-friendly or sustainable energy alternatives is marching forward, even if government takes a hands-off approach. Economics alone will dictate it as people see the alternatives as ways to cut their monthly energy bills. And as electric cars progress, you'll see more people opting for one regardless of environmental factors, simply because they like the reliability factor. (No more complicated transmission in them to break down? That's a pretty big advantage! No more need to worry about changing engine coolant or oil changes? Another improvement in ease of ownership for electric. And electric motors can provide loads of instantaneous torque, meaning they're ideal for performance cars.)
I understand the FCC's position here and all of this makes sense from a legal standpoint.
But all I'm saying is, as a customer who has to implement wireless devices in the workplace as well as what I use at home? TP-Link is pretty much off my list of brands I'll even consider. I believe there are some serious questions about the quality and reliability of what they sell, which may be a reason this "out of compliance" issue came up too. It's part of a larger problem.
EG. We purchased a TP-Link access point recently, as a means to get a networked laser printer onto the office wi-fi network, so it could be moved to an area with no Ethernet jack on a nearby wall. Since then, we've not only had the occasional problem where it has to be unplugged and plugged back in to get the printer back on the network, but at least once - the device started *broadcasting* on its own, popping up a web "portal page" to users when they joined our wi-fi network. Nothing was ever configured in such a way where this AP should have behaved in that manner, and after rebooting the Windows PC that got the sign-in page from the TP-Link, it connected up to the regular wi-fi router with no issues on the subsequent attempt. So this was "phantom behavior" by the TP-Link box -- not easy to track down or duplicate.
And the last time I bought a USB TP-Link Wireless 802.11ac adapter for a PC at home, it only connected to my wifi router properly for about 2-3 minutes at a time. After that, it would just start disconnecting itself randomly or would report it was still connected but no traffic was actually going in or out of it anymore. I tried different driver versions but no luck. I had to conclude it was bad hardware that possibly started acting up only when it got warm from a few minutes of use?
I don't think I'd be too interested in their gear, even if I could re-flash it with custom firmware.
You won't see a lot of positive remarks towards Windows here, period!
But as someone who's not really all that much of a "Linux head"? (I went through a phase where I thought Linux was the end all, be all future of personal computing, but then realized continuing to push it in a corporate setting was simply bad for my chances of continued employment or advancement.) I have to say I'm not at all thrilled by this upgrade.
These days, I try to be as "platform agnostic" as possible. I work for a company where we use roughly 50% Macs and 50% Windows PCs. We run VMWare ESXi on our primary server, even though it cost a lot more than using Microsoft's Hyper-V solution, just because we didn't want to be that reliant on MS technologies where good alternatives existed. And yes, we use a bit of Linux where it makes sense for us -- such as hosting our CrashPlan Pro-E backup solution in some of our offices, or the ESET anti-virus central administration console.
Our company stuck with Windows 7 Pro throughout the whole Windows 8 and 8.1 upgrade cycle, opting to skip it completely since it didn't really have any tangible benefits for us. (Any small improvements were offset by breaking compatibility with some of our EMC software we still use for Finance and the need to re-train a bunch of users on the whole new UI. Plus, we had custom drive images all assembled with our software apps on them. Nobody in I.T. was looking forward to doing all of those over from scratch for Windows 8.)
Now with 10? Microsoft's "only free for a limited time!" push got to my boss, so he started rolling out the upgrades, piecemeal, on machines in a couple of our offices. (Understandably, he didn't want to get stuck having to answer to higher-ups why he didn't bother to take advantage of the free offer while it was out there, leaving us stuck paying thousands in Win 10 licensing down the road when we WERE ready to deploy it fully.)
The whole thing has left us supporting 2 very different OS's at the same time on the Windows side, and since we didn't pay the "Microsoft tax" for the Enterprise edition - we still get stuck with problems like "Candy Crush" installing by default.
I disagree. The whole point is *always* to find a niche, though. You can't sell just any old thing online and expect money to keep rolling in. I used to do computer support for a guy in St. Louis, years ago, who started a business out of his mom's basement selling motorcycle windshields. He'd collect them up at salvage yards and anyplace else he could get them cheap, store them in the basement with little tags telling what size they were and what they went to -- and listed them online.
It wasn't like he got rich off of it -- but it brought in enough income so it paid his bills and supplemented his mom's social security checks.
It's always been this way... and when I first got into the "work world" after college, the whole thing depressed me too. I spent a lot of time asking, "Why? What's the point of all of this, and how did my parents stand it?!"
But the elephant in the corner of the room that everyone likes to ignore is this: People with these "side jobs" are often working smarter, not harder. For example, say you want to start a side business selling something online? You may have to burn a few of those precious weekends working on the setup -- but once the e-commerce site is running, it sells to visitors 24 hours/7 days without you having to do much with it. Your role is probably only going to be in the packing/shipping of products ordered, and handling returns as needed. Granted, that can take some time, but you get to choose when you do it and for how long. You could box up a few items right before bed, perhaps? Or knock some of it out while you're watching some show on TV at night, relaxing. If it does well enough? Now you can afford to pay some teenager to do the hands-on stuff for you, making the operation completely hands-off.
And same kind of thing with people who really do find a way to make their second job a sub-set of their hobby. I know a guy in town, for example, who is really into history. Since he was interested in digging up everything he could find about local history in our city anyway, he decided to start compiling it into books. He's got 3 of them out now that he sells via Facebook and occasionally at a local flea market table, or in other people's shops. He was going to hang onto all of those notes and photos and copies of historical documents anyway... so putting them into book format didn't take a whole lot of extra effort, really.
Dunno... I think I have to cut the author of the original article a little more slack than the parent poster is doing.
I'm not here to argue for the term "side hustle" as the best choice of words. But traditionally, you had a lot of people who worked one full-time or "career job". And then when situations arose where that wasn't cutting it for them to maintain whatever lifestyle they were used to, they'd take on a second job. Sometimes we called this "moonlighting".
The thing is, this "side hustle" seems to me like it's a little bit different. The traditional taking on a second job tended to involve selecting something relatively non-demanding. You might work the night shift at a local gas station, for example, or deliver pizzas. It wasn't usually anything you actually enjoyed doing, but rather, something you could *stand* to do after already putting in an 8 hour day at your primary job. I think what the Millennials are talking about is figuring out something you already kind of like doing, and turning it into a small side business opportunity. It's not about applying for entry level jobs in retail businesses. It's about making the effort to print up business cards or flyers and building a promotional web site, and convincing people they should buy some product or service from you that you can provide in your spare time. BUT, it's a "hustle" because you're probably trying to "fake it until you make it". You want your customers to THINK they're dealing with an entrepreneur who is working on getting that big business loan or venture capital money before long, to really grow the business into something big. But in reality, you're going to make up excuses why you're out of something or can't be there at 3PM next Thursday when your customer would really like the service. Because this is about some extra money on the side; not a hyper-focused effort on going full-time with what's offered.
If there's anything that's a sad commentary on today's society, I think it's not so much that you've got a generation willing to do some of this for the sake of regular trips to Starbucks. But rather, it's sad that the traditional "moonlighting" job positions are often not even available for that purpose today -- because you've got so many applicants who need those as their MAIN job to survive.
I find that annoying or irritating, sure... but not to the point of outrage. In particular, the Surface Pro 4 is actually made by Microsoft, so why wouldn't they design it to help push their latest OS instead of encouraging people to stick with the older stuff they'd like to move away from? That's just good business logic from their perspective.
(And really, it's no different than Apple's business model all along, as a provider of both the hardware and the OS.)
As someone who is a bit of a car enthusiast (always join the forums or car clubs for whatever vehicle I own, etc.) -- the fastest quarter mile results I ever see posted for vehicles taken to the drag strip is 9.x seconds. In most cases, you have people modding various sports or sporty cars to get down into the 12-13 second quarter mile range from wherever they start out at from the factory. Anyone running 11 seconds or under is considered "up there" in performance/speed.
So I'm starting to wonder.... is there pretty much a "hard limit" on how fast a quarter mile you can turn out based on the limitations of physics (tires can only provide so much grip, etc.)? Can you say at some point, "By getting my car to run a 9 second quarter mile, I've optimized it as much as is physically possible for a vehicle that's moving with rolling wheels on the ground?"
At least speaking to healthcare in the USA, I think the furor over "Obamacare" along with rising medical costs across the board, and doctors' frustrating with increased paperwork, is leading to a tipping point.
Almost all of it boils down to problems stemming from healthcare as a profit-generating enterprise.
I absolutely think doctors and staff need to be paid a fair wage for their work, just like anyone else does. But there's got to be some kind of understanding we come to that medical care is treated differently than regular businesses. (If your car needs repair, for example? You have all sorts of options, including doing the repairs yourself or just trading it in and getting a different one. If your body needs repair, you can't just do a DYI heart bypass surgery or "trade it in". You can live with what's broken if it isn't TOO debilitating OR pay the asking price to get treatment.)
Under those circumstances, I think we need to view medicine as more of a charitable work. Whether you're a researcher or a doctor, your goal should be the motivation to help others and make the world a better place. Medicine isn't an appropriate field to get into if you're chasing maximum profits.
One of the best doctor-patient experiences I ever had was also one of the most basic. I had a red spot that kept appearing on my nose, that would get sore to the touch. After a month or so, it would disappear on its own, only to randomly come back again -- seemingly aggravated by sunlight exposure. People started telling me they thought it might be the onset of a skin cancer. I got worried, fearing the worst, and scheduled an appointment with a dermatologist who my parents had gone for for years. The guy was your typical "grouchy old man" who was "all business, no pleasantries". (I think he was about to retire, actually.) But they kept telling me he was good, so I gritted my teeth and went to see him. The doctor said few words... just pulled out his magnifying glass and studied my nose for 15 seconds or so and said, "Hmm.... yes...." Then he prescribed me medication for it and said it wasn't a cancer or anything like that. It was a type of cold sore. Oddly, the medication to keep it away is typically used for STDs (so it's a bit uncomfortable of a prescription to ask for refills on!), but he was absolutely right. Every time it starts to appear, I take one half of one of the pills (all that he said was really required) and it vanishes overnight. And recurrences have diminished over the last year or so.
My point is... THAT was the kind of doctor's visit that was really worth my money. Pay once and let the guy use his expertise to discover the problem... prescribe what's needed to help out, and done. I imagine at most doctor's offices today, the same visit would have involved tons of paperwork, tests being ordered, and follow-up visits. Ridiculous....
The mentality that there's NO reason to upgrade to 10 in a business setting reminds me of the nay-sayers who never wanted to move off of Windows '98, back in the day. Sure, MS put out a lousy OS (Windows ME) as the next part of the upgrade path, just as Windows 8 was a pretty bad attempt at improving 7. But by the time XP came out, it made LOTS of sense to move to it.
I think that's where we're at with Windows 10 now. What do we gain as a company from moving from 7 to 10?
Off-hand:
- Options for full disk encryption without resorting to 3rd. party add-ons - Support for the latest hardware that can't even run older Windows OS versions (like the Surface Pro 4 tablets) - Cortana, giving users a new option to instantly find and launch the applications needed without even touching anything on the PC - Native support for high DPI (4K and 5K) resolution displays with proper font scaling
Secondarily, it just puts your company in a better place, moving forward. Potential new hires can see your organization keeps up with current technology. And it buys you a window of another 4-5 years or more where you know you can buy a new peripheral and it will have driver support, instead of always having to verify if it really "still works with Windows 7".
Except this really doesn't constitute McDonalds or Starbucks "deciding what's good for you" at all. They're simply exercising some control over what they let you do with THEIR Internet connection. Taken to the extreme, you could cry foul that your local Mexican restaurant keeps deciding what kind of music you want to hear by piping in only Hispanic music, when you actually prefer punk rock. But no... it's their place and their right to craft the type of dining experience they want it to have.
To my knowledge, none of these chain restaurants have ever put out pamphlets, posters or other advertising advising you to stop watching porn. They just don't want you to do it on their connection while eating there. That's perfectly reasonable.
I'm interested to see just how motivated Microsoft is to get everyone upgraded to Win 10. The pressure they've been putting on everyone to upgrade before August, when the free upgrades from 7 or 8 expire has been tough for a LOT of people to refuse. But it hasn't been all that realistic for corporate users.
For example, where I work, we had all of our Windows users on Windows 7 Professional. We took a pass on Windows 8. Now, we're ok with making the move to Win 10, except the Microsoft upgrade process isn't always very practical. We usually use a pre-built drive image with all of our software set up on it. But a machine that has never run Win 10 before, even if it "qualifies for a free Windows 10 upgrade" only qualifies if you install 10 via the upgrade process where it can check in with the MS activation server and register the PC as qualifying. If you just blast our pre-made Windows 10 image onto the drive and boot it back up, it boots as inactivated Win 10 and wants you to pay full price for a working product key code.
In a few cases, upgrading the way MS wants you to do it resulted in PCs that had problems. Sometimes it's just because a newer BIOS version needed to be flashed onto it before starting (as happened with one of our older Dell laptops). But it means just telling users they can "go ahead and click the box to do the upgrade" can be trouble-prone. So to ensure a smooth process for people, I.T. has to go through all of this manually. One of our remote offices has resigned itself to just paying full price for Windows 10 licenses for all of its PCs in a couple months, when we get time to do an in-person office visit for a few days. They'd rather pay thousands more to MS than hassle with the process required to get the "qualifying free Win 10 upgrades" for its machines.
How many other places will just skip the upgrade instead of rushing to meet this "free" deadline? If there are enough of them, I bet MS does something else to get people on Win 10 at no cost or at reduced cost.
I mean, seriously -- we're saying a guy can be moderately overweight and only lose an average of 12 months off his lifespan? How many hours of a person's life are robbed from trying to do workouts they don't even enjoy doing, or turning down the foods they really want to eat and enjoy, all in an attempt to maintain a weight that's lower than their body's natural "set point" wants it to be if they do nothing special to change it?
IMO, the *real* questions are about QUALITY of life vs. how many months we can extend one. If you're in a situation where some weight loss prevents you from becoming a diabetic, for example? Now we're talking about a really valid reason to make life/diet changes that you may not necessarily care for or enjoy.
People have been successfully buying and assembling gaming PCs from selected parts for MANY years now, and the process has only gotten easier with time; not harder.
I remember in the early 1990's taking a job with a "mom and pop" computer reseller. We were occasionally asked to build someone a good "gaming PC" or "file server" or other such requests. Back then, you still had the old AT style power supplies in use, not ATX or ITX. With AT style, you were responsible for connecting the 4 colored power wires to the back of the ON/OFF switch yourself. Mix them up and you created a dead short that tended to blow up the whole thing the moment you powered it on.
Now, power ON/OFF is handled by the motherboard itself, so you only have to connect a power switch jumper to a couple of pins on the motherboard (and polarity doesn't even matter).
And CPUs are easier to install without damaging them too! On the old ones from the i386 and i486 days, you had relatively long pins under them which easily got bent. Whenever that happened, you were stuck trying to use a tweezers or very small screwdriver to pry the bent pin back up. Half the time, it would wind up snapping off instead, trashing the CPU.
Don't forget that today's motherboards have all of the peripheral ports integrated on them! In the "bad old days", you had to install a card for your hard drive controller and serial/parallel ports, a card to handle your sound, and cards for your USB or firewire ports if you wanted those. Often, at least one of those boards would have some kind of incompatibility with the rest of your hardware so you had to troubleshoot all of that and possibly try other makes/brands of cards to get it all playing well together. Re-configuring said cards usually involved placing jumpers on the correct rows of pins on the cards, too. No easy software setup!
There are several reasons people buy Apple computers vs. building a PC - but gaming is very rarely one of them! I use Macs at home and have for the last 10 years or so. But I still put together my own Windows 10 gaming PC for games like Fallout 4 I wanted to play on it. As I get older though, I generally prefer the "unbox it and go" experience I get with a pre-built machine, and I like a lot of things about the Apple experience when I'm going to go that route anyway. (OS X is still my preferred operating system, and I appreciate having local stores all over the country where I can schedule appointments to have my machine serviced, rather than always having to mail it out someplace after calling some toll-free support number and wasting an hour or more on the phone.)
Yep! I know this might come across as a "slam" against younger workers -- but I agree without meaning it that way.
Younger I.T. workers bring a lot of things to the table, but a rich experience working with older technologies is not typically one of them. I see a lot of "re-inventing the wheel" going on with new web-based services many startups keep trying to launch. Sometimes they're a success, but a lot of older people in I.T. look at the stuff and just shake our heads. We've seen other ways the same thing has been implemented before, and can't see why it's worth all that money to rehash it with a pretty new web front-end.
I deal with this all the time with supporting a lot of younger professionals in marketing and creative work. They're always struggling to figure out ways to get very large files transferred to clients, when the attachments are too big to email. They resort to paid web services that aren't all that reliable, and then we field dozens of support tickets asking why someone can't get a download to start when they click the link, or why they were never emailed the invite to get the file.... on and on. All along, we had a secure FTP server set up which gets the job done quickly and reliably. But it's a battle to convince them that the person on the other side really *can* install a free FTP client easily and successfully log in to grab the needed files.
Almost every time we get that process going though? Everyone involved loves it and there's no more heartburn about getting files to or from that client. Whaddya know? Sometimes the decades old solution still works the best!
First of all, the whole "technical glitch" claim when this new "live content" is suddenly pulled *could* be legitimate. I'm not saying Facebook has done much to deserve the benefit of the doubt based on its actions in the past.... but it's quite possible these live streams of very popular "breaking news story" type content are overloading the servers they're getting hosted on. Maybe FB has to pull stuff when it gets too many simultaneous views and move it elsewhere, to keep it from impacting performance of the rest of the site? I don't know what they have to juggle behind the scenes to keep everything working properly, but I imagine there's a lot of this manual intervention required. Even our MS Exchange mail hosting service has struggles with automatic load-balancers and regularly pins the blame on them when strange things start happening with devices not receiving mail.
Second, I think there have to be some expectations set with "social media" as a whole. Just because social media sites are adding capabilities like live-streaming video doesn't make them a substitute for a commercial news station. At best, they have the same status as your run of the mill blogger. Certainly, some breaking news happens thanks to these sites distributing it first. But there's no guarantee the content will reliably stay online to reference it for others to view or read it, and it's liable to be presented with a strong bias attached.
IMO, there's a weird symbiotic relationship between news media and social media going on. While social media is happy to grab up a lot of the "eyeballs" that would traditionally have watched television news or read printed news instead? The news media benefits, in turn, by selectively rebroadcasting some of the content, straight from social media sites, vs. incurring the expense of sending news teams to record that content themselves all the time. Even if we're talking only printed news -- they can literally break new stories based solely on what they saw happen or read about on social media.
The truth of the matter is, Tesla pretty much HAS to come out swinging, defending its self-driving technology, or else it's easily "game over" before it even really gets started for them. Somebody had to release the tech for the general public to use first, and Tesla took the chance. (The other car manufacturers have been far more conservative with things, offering only "emergency braking / collision detection and avoidance" or just parallel parking assist.... individual components that would make up a "self driving car".)
That said? I agree with the folks here saying his stats are way off the mark and unrealistic. Since you can't even use his technology right now when not on a highway, it's not even an option for saving any lives in collisions that happen on smaller roads.
I think it was Mercedes or maybe Audi who commented that the Tesla system uses cameras and computer AI to determine if something is in the car's way. Their system used radar in conjunction with cameras, which sounds superior to me.
Consistently, the top cities for I.T. jobs/careers also have some of the highest costs of living in the nation. And often, the average salaries paid in those "top cities" are really pretty sub-par for the areas. (Lots of I.T. job availability also means a lot of competition for openings, as people migrate there from all over the country who have those skills.)
As someone who moved to the DC area for an I.T. job, let me tell you -- when you factor in the combo of housing prices at LEAST double to triple what they were in the midwest (whether you're buying or renting) and the commuting challenges up here? I'd advise any of my mid-western friends in I.T. to stay where they are, vs. moving up to this part of the country. Exception would be some kind of sweet government contractor position guaranteeing you 4x your current salary or more.
In my own case, I was simply burnt out and tired of living and working in the same city I grew up in. I was ready to relocate someplace else because 40 years or so in the same city was enough for me, period. The DC area was the opportunity that kind of fell into my lap and I got to work for a firm where 2 of my friends already had a job. So I packed up and went for it. There's not a week that goes by, 4 years later, that I haven't questioned if all of this was really such a good idea. But my wife and I scraped and scratched out a living that's now pretty equivalent to what we had before. We're "doing okay" by most standards.
I'm just saying -- these surveys of "best places to work" are often only looking at a few isolated factors, and they don't REALLY help you make good decisions.
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Obviously, you want a self-driving car to have the best possible auto-pilot technology you can put into it. But purposeful attempts to trick it into not detecting objects, or into thinking objects are there that aren't really there? That means nothing, IMO. What matters is that it does a reliable job of these things in real-world situations where nobody is TRYING to fool the system.
Human drivers see things all the time and misinterpret them. (There's that popular photo going around social media where someone painted a tunnel on the side of a concrete wall and a car tried to drive off the road, into it, for example. And certainly, people have reported mirages ahead of them on roads for decades.)
Actually, I don't think you're talking about something equivalent, even though I know what you're saying. (I have Comcast too, and my set top box also has a FireWire port on the back of it.)
The thing is though? In order to download the files on your DVR to your computer, you'd still have to do all of that via the hardware Comcast provided you -- meaning you'd also presumably only have access to content that you were paying your monthly subscription for in the first place. (I remember when people first discovered that ability to connect some of the digital set-top boxes to computers via FireWire, the whole "piracy" thing was a hot topic. But it quickly settled back down when people realized it was just a digital version of exactly what you could always do with a VCR or DVDR connected through a different set of connectors.)
I think what the cable providers don't like with the current FCC proposal is the idea that they lose direct control over what the set-top boxes do that decode their programming. For example... What if someone designed a digital set top box that worked the way the Plex media server works on a computer, where you can share your content with other users? One person could pay for a Showtime or HBO subscription, record a bunch of shows to a DVR built into such a box, and then allow any of their "friends" to stream the content to their own box of the same make/model, regardless of what their personal cable package contained in it.
I was with you until you started in with that "White people get hours and tear-gas. Black people get bullets." stuff.
Actually, white people get killed for the same kind of thing by cops, but black people get news coverage and white people get media silence. So unless you dig a little deeper to follow such things, you wouldn't realize it.
That whole argument of a need to "account for externalities" is questionable, IMO.
It sounds like a rational argument for carbon taxes and the like, with that explanation that the free marketplace failed to account for those things, so it fills in that gap.
But traditionally, these "external factors" were never accounted for, because they involve basic resources on the planet that are accessible and shared by everyone, and essentially viewed as "free". I'm not sure that there's really any way to calculate the correct "cost" of using any of them that isn't biased towards certain individuals?
I mean, should we start applying a tax to everyone who grows crops or a garden for "soil nutrient depletion"? Once you start with the concept, where does it end? I think you'd have to logically extend it to all sorts of things.... (Heck, they tried this up here in Maryland, with a "rain tax" that made you pay based on how much impermeable surface you owned on your land. The argument was, you were negatively impacting the environment if the rain water couldn't soak into the ground in any place you constructed something or paved over some soil, so you needed to pay compensation for doing it. It was VERY unpopular and got repealed.)
With ANY of these situations, there's no agreement on what you're really costing "future generations" by taking actions that manipulate the environment around you. I think the free marketplace handles this by letting people deal with any consequences as they arise and impede progress. Maybe that's more "reactionary" than you'd ideally like? But it ensures we aren't duped into wasting huge sums of money on false solutions to problems. If we took all the fossil fuels offline right now, we'd lose so much energy generation capacity, it would put us in a really bad position to move forward to solve the climate change issues.
From the very first post on here in response to the article, you had someone on a rant about the economy hurting Millennials so much, they simply can't afford to have sex anymore.
Just based on history, that's a hugely flawed assumption because it's most often the very poor who wind up having a lot of sex and consequently, the most kids. When you don't have the money to find other ways to keep entertained or busy, sex is often the "trusty fallback" to escape the world for a little while. And even if you wind up having a kid, at least the kid is seen a valuable possession or gift, in a world where you don't have much of value.
The man doesn't speak for *many* who traditionally aligned themselves as "Republican". (That's why you have the party imploding, and why it already split with the "Tea Party Republicans".)
Whether or not Trump gets elected to office, I think the party is pretty much done for. The only way it's getting salvaged is if a lot of the people who got disgusted with it and walked away, combined with the more "Centrist" or Libertarian members get together and revamp it.
When you talk to many of THOSE Republicans, they're not a fan of proposals like Obama's and Mrs. Clinton's attempts to end the coal industry -- but not because they deny climate change exists. They simply believe (as do I, actually) that the change needs to happen on its own -- not via government mandate/force. Because for one thing, you otherwise create a lot of collateral damage to our economy. Don't forget, for example, that our freight rail system transports more coal than almost anything else. If you eliminate the coal industry right now, you may as well also kill freight rail while you're at it. And THAT doesn't seem like a very environmentally sound move, since everything else carried by rail today would have to go by individual trucks instead. Plus, it puts the remaining coal miners out of work as well as the railroad workers. Those are two industries where you don't need a lot of formal education to earn a paycheck that can sustain a family. What's the plan for all of those displaced workers? Tell them all to become solar panel installers?!
IMO, what's not really very realistic is the posturing and "scare tactics" going on with climate change, that we must make drastic changes NOW or else risk dire consequences. In reality, the whole thing won't suddenly reverse itself after 200+ years of burning fossil fuels worldwide, just because in 2017, we mandate an end to much of it. The move to more environmentally-friendly or sustainable energy alternatives is marching forward, even if government takes a hands-off approach. Economics alone will dictate it as people see the alternatives as ways to cut their monthly energy bills. And as electric cars progress, you'll see more people opting for one regardless of environmental factors, simply because they like the reliability factor. (No more complicated transmission in them to break down? That's a pretty big advantage! No more need to worry about changing engine coolant or oil changes? Another improvement in ease of ownership for electric. And electric motors can provide loads of instantaneous torque, meaning they're ideal for performance cars.)
I understand the FCC's position here and all of this makes sense from a legal standpoint.
But all I'm saying is, as a customer who has to implement wireless devices in the workplace as well as what I use at home? TP-Link is pretty much off my list of brands I'll even consider. I believe there are some serious questions about the quality and reliability of what they sell, which may be a reason this "out of compliance" issue came up too. It's part of a larger problem.
EG. We purchased a TP-Link access point recently, as a means to get a networked laser printer onto the office wi-fi network, so it could be moved to an area with no Ethernet jack on a nearby wall. Since then, we've not only had the occasional problem where it has to be unplugged and plugged back in to get the printer back on the network, but at least once - the device started *broadcasting* on its own, popping up a web "portal page" to users when they joined our wi-fi network. Nothing was ever configured in such a way where this AP should have behaved in that manner, and after rebooting the Windows PC that got the sign-in page from the TP-Link, it connected up to the regular wi-fi router with no issues on the subsequent attempt. So this was "phantom behavior" by the TP-Link box -- not easy to track down or duplicate.
And the last time I bought a USB TP-Link Wireless 802.11ac adapter for a PC at home, it only connected to my wifi router properly for about 2-3 minutes at a time. After that, it would just start disconnecting itself randomly or would report it was still connected but no traffic was actually going in or out of it anymore. I tried different driver versions but no luck. I had to conclude it was bad hardware that possibly started acting up only when it got warm from a few minutes of use?
I don't think I'd be too interested in their gear, even if I could re-flash it with custom firmware.
You won't see a lot of positive remarks towards Windows here, period!
But as someone who's not really all that much of a "Linux head"? (I went through a phase where I thought Linux was the end all, be all future of personal computing, but then realized continuing to push it in a corporate setting was simply bad for my chances of continued employment or advancement.) I have to say I'm not at all thrilled by this upgrade.
These days, I try to be as "platform agnostic" as possible. I work for a company where we use roughly 50% Macs and 50% Windows PCs. We run VMWare ESXi on our primary server, even though it cost a lot more than using Microsoft's Hyper-V solution, just because we didn't want to be that reliant on MS technologies where good alternatives existed. And yes, we use a bit of Linux where it makes sense for us -- such as hosting our CrashPlan Pro-E backup solution in some of our offices, or the ESET anti-virus central administration console.
Our company stuck with Windows 7 Pro throughout the whole Windows 8 and 8.1 upgrade cycle, opting to skip it completely since it didn't really have any tangible benefits for us. (Any small improvements were offset by breaking compatibility with some of our EMC software we still use for Finance and the need to re-train a bunch of users on the whole new UI. Plus, we had custom drive images all assembled with our software apps on them. Nobody in I.T. was looking forward to doing all of those over from scratch for Windows 8.)
Now with 10? Microsoft's "only free for a limited time!" push got to my boss, so he started rolling out the upgrades, piecemeal, on machines in a couple of our offices. (Understandably, he didn't want to get stuck having to answer to higher-ups why he didn't bother to take advantage of the free offer while it was out there, leaving us stuck paying thousands in Win 10 licensing down the road when we WERE ready to deploy it fully.)
The whole thing has left us supporting 2 very different OS's at the same time on the Windows side, and since we didn't pay the "Microsoft tax" for the Enterprise edition - we still get stuck with problems like "Candy Crush" installing by default.
I disagree. The whole point is *always* to find a niche, though. You can't sell just any old thing online and expect money to keep rolling in. I used to do computer support for a guy in St. Louis, years ago, who started a business out of his mom's basement selling motorcycle windshields. He'd collect them up at salvage yards and anyplace else he could get them cheap, store them in the basement with little tags telling what size they were and what they went to -- and listed them online.
It wasn't like he got rich off of it -- but it brought in enough income so it paid his bills and supplemented his mom's social security checks.
It's always been this way ... and when I first got into the "work world" after college, the whole thing depressed me too. I spent a lot of time asking, "Why? What's the point of all of this, and how did my parents stand it?!"
But the elephant in the corner of the room that everyone likes to ignore is this: People with these "side jobs" are often working smarter, not harder. For example, say you want to start a side business selling something online? You may have to burn a few of those precious weekends working on the setup -- but once the e-commerce site is running, it sells to visitors 24 hours/7 days without you having to do much with it. Your role is probably only going to be in the packing/shipping of products ordered, and handling returns as needed. Granted, that can take some time, but you get to choose when you do it and for how long. You could box up a few items right before bed, perhaps? Or knock some of it out while you're watching some show on TV at night, relaxing. If it does well enough? Now you can afford to pay some teenager to do the hands-on stuff for you, making the operation completely hands-off.
And same kind of thing with people who really do find a way to make their second job a sub-set of their hobby. I know a guy in town, for example, who is really into history. Since he was interested in digging up everything he could find about local history in our city anyway, he decided to start compiling it into books. He's got 3 of them out now that he sells via Facebook and occasionally at a local flea market table, or in other people's shops. He was going to hang onto all of those notes and photos and copies of historical documents anyway ... so putting them into book format didn't take a whole lot of extra effort, really.
Dunno... I think I have to cut the author of the original article a little more slack than the parent poster is doing.
I'm not here to argue for the term "side hustle" as the best choice of words. But traditionally, you had a lot of people who worked one full-time or "career job". And then when situations arose where that wasn't cutting it for them to maintain whatever lifestyle they were used to, they'd take on a second job. Sometimes we called this "moonlighting".
The thing is, this "side hustle" seems to me like it's a little bit different. The traditional taking on a second job tended to involve selecting something relatively non-demanding. You might work the night shift at a local gas station, for example, or deliver pizzas. It wasn't usually anything you actually enjoyed doing, but rather, something you could *stand* to do after already putting in an 8 hour day at your primary job. I think what the Millennials are talking about is figuring out something you already kind of like doing, and turning it into a small side business opportunity. It's not about applying for entry level jobs in retail businesses. It's about making the effort to print up business cards or flyers and building a promotional web site, and convincing people they should buy some product or service from you that you can provide in your spare time. BUT, it's a "hustle" because you're probably trying to "fake it until you make it". You want your customers to THINK they're dealing with an entrepreneur who is working on getting that big business loan or venture capital money before long, to really grow the business into something big. But in reality, you're going to make up excuses why you're out of something or can't be there at 3PM next Thursday when your customer would really like the service. Because this is about some extra money on the side; not a hyper-focused effort on going full-time with what's offered.
If there's anything that's a sad commentary on today's society, I think it's not so much that you've got a generation willing to do some of this for the sake of regular trips to Starbucks. But rather, it's sad that the traditional "moonlighting" job positions are often not even available for that purpose today -- because you've got so many applicants who need those as their MAIN job to survive.
I find that annoying or irritating, sure ... but not to the point of outrage. In particular, the Surface Pro 4 is actually made by Microsoft, so why wouldn't they design it to help push their latest OS instead of encouraging people to stick with the older stuff they'd like to move away from? That's just good business logic from their perspective.
(And really, it's no different than Apple's business model all along, as a provider of both the hardware and the OS.)
As someone who is a bit of a car enthusiast (always join the forums or car clubs for whatever vehicle I own, etc.) -- the fastest quarter mile results I ever see posted for vehicles taken to the drag strip is 9.x seconds. In most cases, you have people modding various sports or sporty cars to get down into the 12-13 second quarter mile range from wherever they start out at from the factory. Anyone running 11 seconds or under is considered "up there" in performance/speed.
So I'm starting to wonder .... is there pretty much a "hard limit" on how fast a quarter mile you can turn out based on the limitations of physics (tires can only provide so much grip, etc.)? Can you say at some point, "By getting my car to run a 9 second quarter mile, I've optimized it as much as is physically possible for a vehicle that's moving with rolling wheels on the ground?"
At least speaking to healthcare in the USA, I think the furor over "Obamacare" along with rising medical costs across the board, and doctors' frustrating with increased paperwork, is leading to a tipping point.
Almost all of it boils down to problems stemming from healthcare as a profit-generating enterprise.
I absolutely think doctors and staff need to be paid a fair wage for their work, just like anyone else does. But there's got to be some kind of understanding we come to that medical care is treated differently than regular businesses. (If your car needs repair, for example? You have all sorts of options, including doing the repairs yourself or just trading it in and getting a different one. If your body needs repair, you can't just do a DYI heart bypass surgery or "trade it in". You can live with what's broken if it isn't TOO debilitating OR pay the asking price to get treatment.)
Under those circumstances, I think we need to view medicine as more of a charitable work. Whether you're a researcher or a doctor, your goal should be the motivation to help others and make the world a better place. Medicine isn't an appropriate field to get into if you're chasing maximum profits.
One of the best doctor-patient experiences I ever had was also one of the most basic. I had a red spot that kept appearing on my nose, that would get sore to the touch. After a month or so, it would disappear on its own, only to randomly come back again -- seemingly aggravated by sunlight exposure. People started telling me they thought it might be the onset of a skin cancer. I got worried, fearing the worst, and scheduled an appointment with a dermatologist who my parents had gone for for years. The guy was your typical "grouchy old man" who was "all business, no pleasantries". (I think he was about to retire, actually.) But they kept telling me he was good, so I gritted my teeth and went to see him. The doctor said few words... just pulled out his magnifying glass and studied my nose for 15 seconds or so and said, "Hmm.... yes...." Then he prescribed me medication for it and said it wasn't a cancer or anything like that. It was a type of cold sore. Oddly, the medication to keep it away is typically used for STDs (so it's a bit uncomfortable of a prescription to ask for refills on!), but he was absolutely right. Every time it starts to appear, I take one half of one of the pills (all that he said was really required) and it vanishes overnight. And recurrences have diminished over the last year or so.
My point is ... THAT was the kind of doctor's visit that was really worth my money. Pay once and let the guy use his expertise to discover the problem ... prescribe what's needed to help out, and done. I imagine at most doctor's offices today, the same visit would have involved tons of paperwork, tests being ordered, and follow-up visits. Ridiculous ....
The mentality that there's NO reason to upgrade to 10 in a business setting reminds me of the nay-sayers who never wanted to move off of Windows '98, back in the day. Sure, MS put out a lousy OS (Windows ME) as the next part of the upgrade path, just as Windows 8 was a pretty bad attempt at improving 7. But by the time XP came out, it made LOTS of sense to move to it.
I think that's where we're at with Windows 10 now. What do we gain as a company from moving from 7 to 10?
Off-hand:
- Options for full disk encryption without resorting to 3rd. party add-ons
- Support for the latest hardware that can't even run older Windows OS versions (like the Surface Pro 4 tablets)
- Cortana, giving users a new option to instantly find and launch the applications needed without even touching anything on the PC
- Native support for high DPI (4K and 5K) resolution displays with proper font scaling
Secondarily, it just puts your company in a better place, moving forward. Potential new hires can see your organization keeps up with current technology. And it buys you a window of another 4-5 years or more where you know you can buy a new peripheral and it will have driver support, instead of always having to verify if it really "still works with Windows 7".
Except this really doesn't constitute McDonalds or Starbucks "deciding what's good for you" at all. They're simply exercising some control over what they let you do with THEIR Internet connection. Taken to the extreme, you could cry foul that your local Mexican restaurant keeps deciding what kind of music you want to hear by piping in only Hispanic music, when you actually prefer punk rock. But no ... it's their place and their right to craft the type of dining experience they want it to have.
To my knowledge, none of these chain restaurants have ever put out pamphlets, posters or other advertising advising you to stop watching porn. They just don't want you to do it on their connection while eating there. That's perfectly reasonable.
I'm interested to see just how motivated Microsoft is to get everyone upgraded to Win 10. The pressure they've been putting on everyone to upgrade before August, when the free upgrades from 7 or 8 expire has been tough for a LOT of people to refuse. But it hasn't been all that realistic for corporate users.
For example, where I work, we had all of our Windows users on Windows 7 Professional. We took a pass on Windows 8. Now, we're ok with making the move to Win 10, except the Microsoft upgrade process isn't always very practical. We usually use a pre-built drive image with all of our software set up on it. But a machine that has never run Win 10 before, even if it "qualifies for a free Windows 10 upgrade" only qualifies if you install 10 via the upgrade process where it can check in with the MS activation server and register the PC as qualifying. If you just blast our pre-made Windows 10 image onto the drive and boot it back up, it boots as inactivated Win 10 and wants you to pay full price for a working product key code.
In a few cases, upgrading the way MS wants you to do it resulted in PCs that had problems. Sometimes it's just because a newer BIOS version needed to be flashed onto it before starting (as happened with one of our older Dell laptops). But it means just telling users they can "go ahead and click the box to do the upgrade" can be trouble-prone. So to ensure a smooth process for people, I.T. has to go through all of this manually. One of our remote offices has resigned itself to just paying full price for Windows 10 licenses for all of its PCs in a couple months, when we get time to do an in-person office visit for a few days. They'd rather pay thousands more to MS than hassle with the process required to get the "qualifying free Win 10 upgrades" for its machines.
How many other places will just skip the upgrade instead of rushing to meet this "free" deadline? If there are enough of them, I bet MS does something else to get people on Win 10 at no cost or at reduced cost.
I mean, seriously -- we're saying a guy can be moderately overweight and only lose an average of 12 months off his lifespan? How many hours of a person's life are robbed from trying to do workouts they don't even enjoy doing, or turning down the foods they really want to eat and enjoy, all in an attempt to maintain a weight that's lower than their body's natural "set point" wants it to be if they do nothing special to change it?
IMO, the *real* questions are about QUALITY of life vs. how many months we can extend one. If you're in a situation where some weight loss prevents you from becoming a diabetic, for example? Now we're talking about a really valid reason to make life/diet changes that you may not necessarily care for or enjoy.
Darnit ... I meant July and 7. But too bad, so sad /. has no editing system one you click that submit button.
They held it on June 12th. Neither 6 nor 12 are prime numbers!
People have been successfully buying and assembling gaming PCs from selected parts for MANY years now, and the process has only gotten easier with time; not harder.
I remember in the early 1990's taking a job with a "mom and pop" computer reseller. We were occasionally asked to build someone a good "gaming PC" or "file server" or other such requests. Back then, you still had the old AT style power supplies in use, not ATX or ITX. With AT style, you were responsible for connecting the 4 colored power wires to the back of the ON/OFF switch yourself. Mix them up and you created a dead short that tended to blow up the whole thing the moment you powered it on.
Now, power ON/OFF is handled by the motherboard itself, so you only have to connect a power switch jumper to a couple of pins on the motherboard (and polarity doesn't even matter).
And CPUs are easier to install without damaging them too! On the old ones from the i386 and i486 days, you had relatively long pins under them which easily got bent. Whenever that happened, you were stuck trying to use a tweezers or very small screwdriver to pry the bent pin back up. Half the time, it would wind up snapping off instead, trashing the CPU.
Don't forget that today's motherboards have all of the peripheral ports integrated on them! In the "bad old days", you had to install a card for your hard drive controller and serial/parallel ports, a card to handle your sound, and cards for your USB or firewire ports if you wanted those. Often, at least one of those boards would have some kind of incompatibility with the rest of your hardware so you had to troubleshoot all of that and possibly try other makes/brands of cards to get it all playing well together. Re-configuring said cards usually involved placing jumpers on the correct rows of pins on the cards, too. No easy software setup!
There are several reasons people buy Apple computers vs. building a PC - but gaming is very rarely one of them! I use Macs at home and have for the last 10 years or so. But I still put together my own Windows 10 gaming PC for games like Fallout 4 I wanted to play on it. As I get older though, I generally prefer the "unbox it and go" experience I get with a pre-built machine, and I like a lot of things about the Apple experience when I'm going to go that route anyway. (OS X is still my preferred operating system, and I appreciate having local stores all over the country where I can schedule appointments to have my machine serviced, rather than always having to mail it out someplace after calling some toll-free support number and wasting an hour or more on the phone.)
Yep! I know this might come across as a "slam" against younger workers -- but I agree without meaning it that way.
Younger I.T. workers bring a lot of things to the table, but a rich experience working with older technologies is not typically one of them. I see a lot of "re-inventing the wheel" going on with new web-based services many startups keep trying to launch. Sometimes they're a success, but a lot of older people in I.T. look at the stuff and just shake our heads. We've seen other ways the same thing has been implemented before, and can't see why it's worth all that money to rehash it with a pretty new web front-end.
I deal with this all the time with supporting a lot of younger professionals in marketing and creative work. They're always struggling to figure out ways to get very large files transferred to clients, when the attachments are too big to email. They resort to paid web services that aren't all that reliable, and then we field dozens of support tickets asking why someone can't get a download to start when they click the link, or why they were never emailed the invite to get the file.... on and on. All along, we had a secure FTP server set up which gets the job done quickly and reliably. But it's a battle to convince them that the person on the other side really *can* install a free FTP client easily and successfully log in to grab the needed files.
Almost every time we get that process going though? Everyone involved loves it and there's no more heartburn about getting files to or from that client. Whaddya know? Sometimes the decades old solution still works the best!
First of all, the whole "technical glitch" claim when this new "live content" is suddenly pulled *could* be legitimate. I'm not saying Facebook has done much to deserve the benefit of the doubt based on its actions in the past.... but it's quite possible these live streams of very popular "breaking news story" type content are overloading the servers they're getting hosted on. Maybe FB has to pull stuff when it gets too many simultaneous views and move it elsewhere, to keep it from impacting performance of the rest of the site? I don't know what they have to juggle behind the scenes to keep everything working properly, but I imagine there's a lot of this manual intervention required. Even our MS Exchange mail hosting service has struggles with automatic load-balancers and regularly pins the blame on them when strange things start happening with devices not receiving mail.
Second, I think there have to be some expectations set with "social media" as a whole. Just because social media sites are adding capabilities like live-streaming video doesn't make them a substitute for a commercial news station. At best, they have the same status as your run of the mill blogger. Certainly, some breaking news happens thanks to these sites distributing it first. But there's no guarantee the content will reliably stay online to reference it for others to view or read it, and it's liable to be presented with a strong bias attached.
IMO, there's a weird symbiotic relationship between news media and social media going on. While social media is happy to grab up a lot of the "eyeballs" that would traditionally have watched television news or read printed news instead? The news media benefits, in turn, by selectively rebroadcasting some of the content, straight from social media sites, vs. incurring the expense of sending news teams to record that content themselves all the time. Even if we're talking only printed news -- they can literally break new stories based solely on what they saw happen or read about on social media.
The truth of the matter is, Tesla pretty much HAS to come out swinging, defending its self-driving technology, or else it's easily "game over" before it even really gets started for them. Somebody had to release the tech for the general public to use first, and Tesla took the chance. (The other car manufacturers have been far more conservative with things, offering only "emergency braking / collision detection and avoidance" or just parallel parking assist.... individual components that would make up a "self driving car".)
That said? I agree with the folks here saying his stats are way off the mark and unrealistic. Since you can't even use his technology right now when not on a highway, it's not even an option for saving any lives in collisions that happen on smaller roads.
I think it was Mercedes or maybe Audi who commented that the Tesla system uses cameras and computer AI to determine if something is in the car's way. Their system used radar in conjunction with cameras, which sounds superior to me.
Consistently, the top cities for I.T. jobs/careers also have some of the highest costs of living in the nation. And often, the average salaries paid in those "top cities" are really pretty sub-par for the areas. (Lots of I.T. job availability also means a lot of competition for openings, as people migrate there from all over the country who have those skills.)
As someone who moved to the DC area for an I.T. job, let me tell you -- when you factor in the combo of housing prices at LEAST double to triple what they were in the midwest (whether you're buying or renting) and the commuting challenges up here? I'd advise any of my mid-western friends in I.T. to stay where they are, vs. moving up to this part of the country. Exception would be some kind of sweet government contractor position guaranteeing you 4x your current salary or more.
In my own case, I was simply burnt out and tired of living and working in the same city I grew up in. I was ready to relocate someplace else because 40 years or so in the same city was enough for me, period. The DC area was the opportunity that kind of fell into my lap and I got to work for a firm where 2 of my friends already had a job. So I packed up and went for it. There's not a week that goes by, 4 years later, that I haven't questioned if all of this was really such a good idea. But my wife and I scraped and scratched out a living that's now pretty equivalent to what we had before. We're "doing okay" by most standards.
I'm just saying -- these surveys of "best places to work" are often only looking at a few isolated factors, and they don't REALLY help you make good decisions.