Personally I'm probably going to buy AMD for my next build. I've got an Ivy Bridge that's still serviceable enough, but now that 8-core chips have come down to mainstream prices and AMD doesn't have anemic performance compared to Intel for most workloads, I'm more than willing to give them my business. They should have their CPU lineup refreshed around April and I expect NVidia to start launching their newest line of Volta GPUs around that time as well so it's a good time to put together a new PC.
Just go to outdoor, multi-day music festivals for live music. Not only do you get to see a lot of great acts that you've probably never heard of before, but most people there are too stoned to care about dragging out their phone to capture the moment because they're too busy being in it.
And if some people do haul out the phones or act like obnoxious shits, you can personally be too stoned to get bothered by any of it.
I think that their problem is that they continually wanted to protest some action and kept pushing the clock closer, only now they've run out of room and look damned foolish because all of these little political statements have add up to what we see now. As you point out when you look at it in a historical context, it makes you roll your eyes quite a bit.
They clearly need to walk the clock back quite a bit and do so periodically when whatever new thing they're worried about fails to come to pass or lead to new cause for concern.
For as much truth or insight as his post may contain, he still really doesn't get Google at all. Google's customers aren't the people who use Android, Google+, Google Voice, etc. Google's customers are advertisers that want to have eyeballs and ear holes to blast their ads at and they don't care about innovation, they just want something that works and Google wants to make sure that they keep those real customers of theirs by offering a rival to anything else that is being used to sell ads online. They didn't make Google+ because they wanted a better social network, they made Google+ so that if social networks became the new center of online advertising instead of web search that Google wouldn't end up out in the rain.
Sure, they have some people researching some really cool technology, but so does Microsoft and we saw how little of that managed to gain any traction whenever they bothered to let the public catch a whiff of something. It's the same with Google and for the same reasons that it doesn't go anywhere. They just don't truly care about it as a product and load it down with bloat or other cruft to tie it in with their existing programs or services instead of letting it be something useful on its own.
Did it have anything to do with abuse of monopoly position? There are loads of exclusivity clauses across all manner of product lines, but no one cares if a small company manufacturing purses is selling them exclusively through a single chain of stores. Qualcomm may be a big enough player in that space to constitute a monopoly and therefor face restrictions in the kinds of actions they can engage in.
The problem with your paradox is that you haven't considered the other end of the argument. If you can't refuse to do business with some market entities then you're not truly free either. Not allowing exclusivity implies that all must be included which curtails market freedom just as much. As a company, I shouldn't be forced to source components from other companies I don't want to, and as a component supplier I shouldn't be forced to supply a manufacturer if I don't want to. The same goes for stores: they shouldn't be forced to stock goods from all suppliers and suppliers should be free to refuse to act as a direct distributor of their product to a given store.
I don't think exclusivity contracts curtail freedom at all as long as neither party is compelled to enter into the arrangement and as long as customers are still free to choose between multiple end products. Once you have monopolies engaging in this type of behavior I'd argue that it's ultimately harmful to not just the market as a whole, but to one of the companies as well, at least in the long term. In this case, Apple may get a sweet deal now, but if it ultimately stifles competition in that space or drives other companies out of business, Apple has a much weaker position in the future and is more likely to be stuck with higher costs and an inability to get parts from other companies. We saw the other end of this a while back when Apple announced they would be developing their own graphics going forward leaving the company that had previously supplied them in a terrible position since Apple was their largest customer and represented the vast majority of their business.
But the common man on the street doesn't know that's what autopilot means and is likely to think it means the plane flying itself because they've never been in a cockpit or have any real idea what pilots do beyond vague notions of flying the plane.
Tariffs only make sense if the Chinese government is subsidizing their solar panel manufacturing to the extent that those companies are essentially dumping.
Otherwise, if Chinese manufacturers can produce panels more efficiently than U.S. manufacturers, its in our best interest to import panels and focus our efforts to areas where we're more efficient. Being able to manufacture solar panels has nowhere near the impact on energy independence as does producing ones own fossil fuels. Existing panels don't suddenly stop working if we stop trading with China.
China proper doesn't have a a completely free market. The government has been fairly hands off in a lot of areas, but they still have rules related to foreign investment and how much of a company can be owned by outside investors. They also manipulate their currency in a way that makes a lot of their industries vastly more competitive than they would be otherwise.
However, Hong Kong (and some of the similar economic zones within China) has what is regarded as the world's freest market. (PDF Warning)
I only wish I were getting paid for half of the shit I think up sometimes. The simple truth is that Russia probably doesn't even need to go to those lengths when the monsters are due on maple street.
I think we're already stuck in the kind of mental rut that the country was in after the September 11 attacks that resulted in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I doubt the consequences of this will be anywhere near as severe, but this is something that's clearly gained a life of its own. There may well be a kernel of truth under it all, but the story has probably grown much larger in the retelling.
I wonder if Russia is behind Facebook's reopening of this probe into Russian meddling in Brexit. If you're Russia it seems like the best way to stir up shit in opposing powers is to let them tear themselves in half over whether or not Russia was involved in influencing their government in some way.
If people really care about privacy and there's no other stores available to shop at, they can always pay someone else to do their shopping for them. One person buys everything for a dozen people or so which makes the collected data useless since it can't be tied to any one person in particular.
If they were stolen from a truck, Apple probably had a range of serial numbers (or some other identifier like an IMEI) for the phones that should have been on the truck. I could easily see them getting that wrong in some way or accidentally adding a few additional devices to the list of those suspected stolen. Since someone had bought this one and activated it, it showed up on the grid. I don't know whether or not Apple can see that themselves, but they would have given the numbers to the major carriers who would certainly be able to tell.
Normally you probably wouldn't expect a huge response over a stolen phone, but from the perspective of the police this one showing up might not just be one phone, but the person who took the whole lot using one of the devices or at least someone related to the criminal enterprise responsible. The cops probably thought that they were busting a criminal with a closet full of stolen goods, or could at least easily imagine that scenario.
Of course the kind of thieves that would knock off a truck with iPhones in it know better than to activate any of these anywhere in the country. If you're smart enough to learn which truck to hit, and to pull off the theft without getting caught while doing it in a mall parking lot, then it's probably safe to say you know what not to do with your new ill-gotten cargo. These are going to be on their way to Asia or some other part of the world where the carriers don't really give a shit.
Considering that this is a torpedo and those travel through and under water, does it really make sense to talk about what a 100 megaton atomic weapon would do if it were dropped on a city?
Something like this is scary enough in its own rights, if only because there may not be as good of defenses in place which make it individually more likely to succeed, but even a much smaller warhead would be effective if it came to nuclear war. Never mind that if we're in that situation at all, both the U.S. and Russia already have enough conventional nuclear weapons to destroy each other several times over and neither of us could stop the others entire arsenal.
I once heard somewhere that the the Russian researchers behind the domesticated fox project not only kept and selectively bred the most friendly animals (leading to the domesticated fox), but also did the same for those that were the least domesticated, creating more ferocious and wild animals.
I'd like to think that flat-earthers are proof of a similar alien project related to human intelligence and that the aliens are also keeping the most aggressively stupid offspring.
It might find some niche even if never becomes a mainstream product, much like Linux never really took off on the desktop, but became insanely important in the server space. I suspect that this could be successful for low-cost devices that need a lightweight processor. As overall device costs decrease, the extra costs from buying a third party SoC become larger and using an old process node and an open design is going to result in some potentially significant savings.
I also think something like this has some value in education even if it doesn't do much commercially.
There's just no convincing some people. You could send them into space so they could see for themselves and they'd swear up and down you'd really just put them in some kind of sophisticated VR room and faked the entire thing.
I'm not part of terribly many mailing lists and most of them are rather niche and don't have a lot of activity so perhaps I can't generalize this, but I can't recall them ever really needing moderation. I suppose you'll never stop dedicated trolls, but it seems like they're less likely to get involved with mailing lists in the first place, whereas forums seem far more likely to draw their attentions.
I doubt that the Swift mailing list was getting a lot of GNAA trolls or people whining about Trump/Obama/Bush/Clinton or a lot of the other shit that gets posted here regularly.
Oddly enough, most of the women I know tend to carry larger phones like the Samsung Note or the larger iPhone because they can easily keep it in a purse without worry of how well it fits in a pocket and because even with typical phones with screen sizes around 4.5-4.7" they need to use them with two hands anyway.
I can see why a lot of people prefer smaller phones though. Even I find the ~4.7-5.1" displays in most flagship phones a bit cumbersome to use unless I'm holding the phone perfectly which isn't always comfortable. I think that 4.3" would be a sweet spot for the average person, but for whatever reason it isn't a popular size. The last major device at that size that felt like it was given flagship treatment that I'm aware of was the Moto E (back when Google still owned Motorola), but the later generations had the size increased.
If Apple released a new SE with smaller bezels and a 4.3" screen I'd probably buy that in a heartbeat. I guess I don't watch movies or stuff like that where a bigger screen matters, so the improved hand fit and pocketability are more important.
Why bother telling other people what to do. If you truly believe that it's going to fall, you could be shorting it yourself and making a tidy sum in the process.
Probably not, but I think a lot of people are just numb to it by now, and to be honest there's no chance that Clinton wouldn't have extended this either so we were getting this shit sandwich regardless of who was elected.
I don't even think it goes that far. Instead people will rank news based on how well it conforms to their existing beliefs and that's true of anyone regardless of political leanings or level of intelligence. There are very few people capable of being as skeptical about their own beliefs as they are about somebody else's.
I don't see why Facebook wants to do this as it doesn't give them any information (political leanings) that they don't already know and they probably risk pissing off whichever groups have their favorite news sources rated as unreliable. Even if they wanted to try to be nefarious and shape public opinion, they'll scrap this as soon as the users start whining.
Is that still true? I think a lot of people quit watching when John Stewart left. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if most people have moved away from televised news altogether in favor of internet sources with sites like Facebook and Reddit serving as aggregators of sorts.
That's just an inescapable fact though. You could just as easily say that the cost of having police is externalized onto innocent tax payers, but most people are reasonably in favor of having a legal system and officers of the law.
I don't think you'd even need that much range. Have a truck drive to a central area for multiple delivers and have a drone take it from there instead of having a constant back and forth. If there's enough demand you could have multiple drones operate out of a central truck. Hell, eventually you might be able to put the entire kitchen in the truck.
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Personally I'm probably going to buy AMD for my next build. I've got an Ivy Bridge that's still serviceable enough, but now that 8-core chips have come down to mainstream prices and AMD doesn't have anemic performance compared to Intel for most workloads, I'm more than willing to give them my business. They should have their CPU lineup refreshed around April and I expect NVidia to start launching their newest line of Volta GPUs around that time as well so it's a good time to put together a new PC.
Just go to outdoor, multi-day music festivals for live music. Not only do you get to see a lot of great acts that you've probably never heard of before, but most people there are too stoned to care about dragging out their phone to capture the moment because they're too busy being in it.
And if some people do haul out the phones or act like obnoxious shits, you can personally be too stoned to get bothered by any of it.
I think that their problem is that they continually wanted to protest some action and kept pushing the clock closer, only now they've run out of room and look damned foolish because all of these little political statements have add up to what we see now. As you point out when you look at it in a historical context, it makes you roll your eyes quite a bit.
They clearly need to walk the clock back quite a bit and do so periodically when whatever new thing they're worried about fails to come to pass or lead to new cause for concern.
It's even worse than that as it's being applied to the books themselves. Asimov's classic is just going to be called Robot in Apple's store.
For as much truth or insight as his post may contain, he still really doesn't get Google at all. Google's customers aren't the people who use Android, Google+, Google Voice, etc. Google's customers are advertisers that want to have eyeballs and ear holes to blast their ads at and they don't care about innovation, they just want something that works and Google wants to make sure that they keep those real customers of theirs by offering a rival to anything else that is being used to sell ads online. They didn't make Google+ because they wanted a better social network, they made Google+ so that if social networks became the new center of online advertising instead of web search that Google wouldn't end up out in the rain.
Sure, they have some people researching some really cool technology, but so does Microsoft and we saw how little of that managed to gain any traction whenever they bothered to let the public catch a whiff of something. It's the same with Google and for the same reasons that it doesn't go anywhere. They just don't truly care about it as a product and load it down with bloat or other cruft to tie it in with their existing programs or services instead of letting it be something useful on its own.
Did it have anything to do with abuse of monopoly position? There are loads of exclusivity clauses across all manner of product lines, but no one cares if a small company manufacturing purses is selling them exclusively through a single chain of stores. Qualcomm may be a big enough player in that space to constitute a monopoly and therefor face restrictions in the kinds of actions they can engage in.
The problem with your paradox is that you haven't considered the other end of the argument. If you can't refuse to do business with some market entities then you're not truly free either. Not allowing exclusivity implies that all must be included which curtails market freedom just as much. As a company, I shouldn't be forced to source components from other companies I don't want to, and as a component supplier I shouldn't be forced to supply a manufacturer if I don't want to. The same goes for stores: they shouldn't be forced to stock goods from all suppliers and suppliers should be free to refuse to act as a direct distributor of their product to a given store.
I don't think exclusivity contracts curtail freedom at all as long as neither party is compelled to enter into the arrangement and as long as customers are still free to choose between multiple end products. Once you have monopolies engaging in this type of behavior I'd argue that it's ultimately harmful to not just the market as a whole, but to one of the companies as well, at least in the long term. In this case, Apple may get a sweet deal now, but if it ultimately stifles competition in that space or drives other companies out of business, Apple has a much weaker position in the future and is more likely to be stuck with higher costs and an inability to get parts from other companies. We saw the other end of this a while back when Apple announced they would be developing their own graphics going forward leaving the company that had previously supplied them in a terrible position since Apple was their largest customer and represented the vast majority of their business.
But the common man on the street doesn't know that's what autopilot means and is likely to think it means the plane flying itself because they've never been in a cockpit or have any real idea what pilots do beyond vague notions of flying the plane.
Tariffs only make sense if the Chinese government is subsidizing their solar panel manufacturing to the extent that those companies are essentially dumping.
Otherwise, if Chinese manufacturers can produce panels more efficiently than U.S. manufacturers, its in our best interest to import panels and focus our efforts to areas where we're more efficient. Being able to manufacture solar panels has nowhere near the impact on energy independence as does producing ones own fossil fuels. Existing panels don't suddenly stop working if we stop trading with China.
China proper doesn't have a a completely free market. The government has been fairly hands off in a lot of areas, but they still have rules related to foreign investment and how much of a company can be owned by outside investors. They also manipulate their currency in a way that makes a lot of their industries vastly more competitive than they would be otherwise.
However, Hong Kong (and some of the similar economic zones within China) has what is regarded as the world's freest market. (PDF Warning)
I only wish I were getting paid for half of the shit I think up sometimes. The simple truth is that Russia probably doesn't even need to go to those lengths when the monsters are due on maple street.
I think we're already stuck in the kind of mental rut that the country was in after the September 11 attacks that resulted in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I doubt the consequences of this will be anywhere near as severe, but this is something that's clearly gained a life of its own. There may well be a kernel of truth under it all, but the story has probably grown much larger in the retelling.
I wonder if Russia is behind Facebook's reopening of this probe into Russian meddling in Brexit. If you're Russia it seems like the best way to stir up shit in opposing powers is to let them tear themselves in half over whether or not Russia was involved in influencing their government in some way.
If people really care about privacy and there's no other stores available to shop at, they can always pay someone else to do their shopping for them. One person buys everything for a dozen people or so which makes the collected data useless since it can't be tied to any one person in particular.
If they were stolen from a truck, Apple probably had a range of serial numbers (or some other identifier like an IMEI) for the phones that should have been on the truck. I could easily see them getting that wrong in some way or accidentally adding a few additional devices to the list of those suspected stolen. Since someone had bought this one and activated it, it showed up on the grid. I don't know whether or not Apple can see that themselves, but they would have given the numbers to the major carriers who would certainly be able to tell.
Normally you probably wouldn't expect a huge response over a stolen phone, but from the perspective of the police this one showing up might not just be one phone, but the person who took the whole lot using one of the devices or at least someone related to the criminal enterprise responsible. The cops probably thought that they were busting a criminal with a closet full of stolen goods, or could at least easily imagine that scenario.
Of course the kind of thieves that would knock off a truck with iPhones in it know better than to activate any of these anywhere in the country. If you're smart enough to learn which truck to hit, and to pull off the theft without getting caught while doing it in a mall parking lot, then it's probably safe to say you know what not to do with your new ill-gotten cargo. These are going to be on their way to Asia or some other part of the world where the carriers don't really give a shit.
Considering that this is a torpedo and those travel through and under water, does it really make sense to talk about what a 100 megaton atomic weapon would do if it were dropped on a city?
Something like this is scary enough in its own rights, if only because there may not be as good of defenses in place which make it individually more likely to succeed, but even a much smaller warhead would be effective if it came to nuclear war. Never mind that if we're in that situation at all, both the U.S. and Russia already have enough conventional nuclear weapons to destroy each other several times over and neither of us could stop the others entire arsenal.
I once heard somewhere that the the Russian researchers behind the domesticated fox project not only kept and selectively bred the most friendly animals (leading to the domesticated fox), but also did the same for those that were the least domesticated, creating more ferocious and wild animals.
I'd like to think that flat-earthers are proof of a similar alien project related to human intelligence and that the aliens are also keeping the most aggressively stupid offspring.
It might find some niche even if never becomes a mainstream product, much like Linux never really took off on the desktop, but became insanely important in the server space. I suspect that this could be successful for low-cost devices that need a lightweight processor. As overall device costs decrease, the extra costs from buying a third party SoC become larger and using an old process node and an open design is going to result in some potentially significant savings.
I also think something like this has some value in education even if it doesn't do much commercially.
There's just no convincing some people. You could send them into space so they could see for themselves and they'd swear up and down you'd really just put them in some kind of sophisticated VR room and faked the entire thing.
I'm not part of terribly many mailing lists and most of them are rather niche and don't have a lot of activity so perhaps I can't generalize this, but I can't recall them ever really needing moderation. I suppose you'll never stop dedicated trolls, but it seems like they're less likely to get involved with mailing lists in the first place, whereas forums seem far more likely to draw their attentions.
I doubt that the Swift mailing list was getting a lot of GNAA trolls or people whining about Trump/Obama/Bush/Clinton or a lot of the other shit that gets posted here regularly.
Oddly enough, most of the women I know tend to carry larger phones like the Samsung Note or the larger iPhone because they can easily keep it in a purse without worry of how well it fits in a pocket and because even with typical phones with screen sizes around 4.5-4.7" they need to use them with two hands anyway.
I can see why a lot of people prefer smaller phones though. Even I find the ~4.7-5.1" displays in most flagship phones a bit cumbersome to use unless I'm holding the phone perfectly which isn't always comfortable. I think that 4.3" would be a sweet spot for the average person, but for whatever reason it isn't a popular size. The last major device at that size that felt like it was given flagship treatment that I'm aware of was the Moto E (back when Google still owned Motorola), but the later generations had the size increased.
If Apple released a new SE with smaller bezels and a 4.3" screen I'd probably buy that in a heartbeat. I guess I don't watch movies or stuff like that where a bigger screen matters, so the improved hand fit and pocketability are more important.
Why bother telling other people what to do. If you truly believe that it's going to fall, you could be shorting it yourself and making a tidy sum in the process.
Probably not, but I think a lot of people are just numb to it by now, and to be honest there's no chance that Clinton wouldn't have extended this either so we were getting this shit sandwich regardless of who was elected.
I don't even think it goes that far. Instead people will rank news based on how well it conforms to their existing beliefs and that's true of anyone regardless of political leanings or level of intelligence. There are very few people capable of being as skeptical about their own beliefs as they are about somebody else's.
I don't see why Facebook wants to do this as it doesn't give them any information (political leanings) that they don't already know and they probably risk pissing off whichever groups have their favorite news sources rated as unreliable. Even if they wanted to try to be nefarious and shape public opinion, they'll scrap this as soon as the users start whining.
Is that still true? I think a lot of people quit watching when John Stewart left. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if most people have moved away from televised news altogether in favor of internet sources with sites like Facebook and Reddit serving as aggregators of sorts.
That's just an inescapable fact though. You could just as easily say that the cost of having police is externalized onto innocent tax payers, but most people are reasonably in favor of having a legal system and officers of the law.
I don't think you'd even need that much range. Have a truck drive to a central area for multiple delivers and have a drone take it from there instead of having a constant back and forth. If there's enough demand you could have multiple drones operate out of a central truck. Hell, eventually you might be able to put the entire kitchen in the truck.