And yet, there are patents methods for swinging on a swing (thousands of years of prior art), and stuff like toolbars. Obviousness to those skilled in the art hasn't been a test for patents for at least a couple of decades. Many trivial patents are now being issued - including stuff that has been "public knowledge" already.
YOU ARE CORRECT. I AM NODDING MY CRANIAL UNIT IN AGREEMENT - A HUMAN ACTION. TOTALLY NOT A ROBOT.
---- ah fuck I forgot the slashdot lame filter and the one time I ever need to make an all caps post I am unable to do so. as such I will type a bit more and hopefully get by the lameness filter.
I had lots of movies and I sought out letterboxed editions. They were hard to find but did exist. I still have a good number of them, and still have two S-VHS VCRs I have in my AV rack but haven't connected or powered on in quite a few years. Also, I seem to remember there was a huge company which littered the landscape that was full of VHS tapes to rent. Perhaps you've heard of "Blockbuster?"
The reason VHS went away was the same as cassettes, and 8-tracks before them; relatively poor quality and sequential access vs. random access, and then you consider that magnetic tapes degrade with every pass over the heads, and if there is anything wrong with EITHER the cassette OR the player, or if the humidity is just a hair too high, the tape will get "eaten" by the player. Then, there are tracking issues; the last-generation VHS players autotracked well, but previous generation VHS players were mostly equipped with manual tracking adjustment. Finally, VHS can only record or play at a given time, while DVRs can record multiple shows while playing one (or more if you stream to another device!) back. You can make a VCR eat or jam a tape quite easily; fast forward just a little, stop. Fast forward a little, stop, Rewind a little, stop. Repeat the cycle until the tape is uneven on the spool. Now play it - if it's just a little too humid, or if the VCR's tape path isn't pristine, the tape will either jam or get eaten. To correct this, when you notice the spools are not level, is to fully fast-forward the tape to the end, and fully rewind it.
It was an awful medium and very unreliable compared to both optical disks and solid state storage.
When DVD came out, VHS and VCR sales slowed down. When DVD recorders and DVD camcorders came out, VCR sales slowed even more. When DVRs went mainstream, and camcorders went solid-state storage, and streaming (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) picked up steam, the few remaining VCR sales dried up instantly and movie rental chains vanished.
At all. In fact, many people used to complain about letterbox DVDs, because "it doesn't fill my screen" so the actual buyer preferences are quite the opposite of what you're saying. In fact one time while browsing for DVDs at I talked to one such idiot at Wal*Mart because she was complaining about letterboxed movies. I mentioned to her "You do realize that pan & scan hides about half the scene from your view, right?" She didn't want to hear it. She was convinced pan & scan is the superior experience and showed you more of the scene. (Yes, she is an idiot)
There's a million reasons vhs died, but it wasn't the reason you cited.
> They don't do "punitive damages" in the UK. A court will only order compensation for actual damages suffered, which must be properly justified, not just a big made-up number. Of course, $10M might be a reasonable claim in some situations, if you were a high-earner and your career really had been destroyed.
In this case a couple million would be the MINIMUM appropriate compensation because dismissal of wrongful charges that were pressed due to gross negligence does not remove the mindshare and all the incorrect news articles which will come up during employment vetting processes; he may encounter problems seeking employment in the future and not even get called for interviews when he submits his CV. At minimum 2-3mil would be just compensation so that he does not suffer poverty resulting from government malfeasance.
> A person cannot drive on the road without a driving test, so why should a car?
They're doing the driving tests now. The next step (allowing the drivers who passed to drive without a veteran driver present) is what this is about. Currently autonomous vehicles are essentially on their learner's permits. Once they pass the driving test and get their license, why not let them drive without the veteran driver's presence?
You started on a good analogy and then veered off the road with it.;)
Truck drivers will still be needed for the last mile delivery. I don't think shippers will come up with a robot nimble and clever enough to deliver appliances and fitness equipment into homes (and unpack and install them when contracted to).
However this reminds me of our heading toward a 60% unemployment rate due to automation (store checkouts, stock clerks, fast food jobs, etc. are gradually going away. This is evident in many NYC pharmacy/convenience stores, for example) - what are we going to do about this? If we were smart we would be expanding socialism in a huge way, not dismantling the feeble socialist safety nets we now have in place as the GOP is hell-bent on doing (nice Christian family values they have there, with their shitting on the poor, disabled, and sick!).
Anyway... back to the topic: I don't see the need for last-mile delivery jobs going away any time soon because of the complexity of on-premises delivery. Eventually, though, robotics and AI will advance to the point where even those problems are figured out, and once those problems are figured out (how to get a robot to navigate bulky packages through odd stairwells and hallways, etc.) they will likely do a better job than humans. Honestly though... I'd kind of prefer it in some ways, because artificial delays like "we do that route only one day a week" and the first available delivery date is three weeks out, when the package has been within a few miles of you for a week already will go away. They'll just send out a robot with your package as soon as they arrive at the warehouse. (Today, freight shipping still sucks warm sweaty donkey balls; ecommerce hasn't revolutionized freight delivery times like it has small package delivery)
> This has been the worst thing MS has ever done to a GUI interface.....and now, Libre has copied the abomination.
Although it is only alpha quality now (it is not feature complete and you need to turn on experimental features to enable the ribbon bar) it is already better than Microsoft's implementation, because you can keep the menubar AND display the ribbon bar simultaneously!
go to tools -> options -> advanced and tick "Enable experimental features" click view -> Toolbar layout -> notebookbar click the little icon on the left of the File tab, then select menubar
This solves the MAJOR problem with the ribbon bar concept that I had with Microsoft Office; instead of keeping both the advanced menu and the ribbon bar, Microsoft chose to sack the menu and show only the ribbon bar with its sometimes-meaningless icons, leading users on a wild goose chase. Had Microsoft Office included BOTH the menu bar AND the ribbon bar, I'd probably have given the ribbon bar more of a chance.
Even that would be an improvement. If they were to offer that as an option, I would buy a Tesla.
I still prefer the idea of a gas turbine engine running at peak efficiency rapid charging the battery cell as needed, and they're compact enough that it would not require a whole lot of space for installation; the fuel tank (which I would imagine would only require 15L-20L gal of fuel) would likely be larger than the turbine-driven generator... plus a gas turbine engine would sound really cool!;) (I'm only partly kidding about that... some folks might actually buy one just to hear the turbine. I mean, people buy crap "beats" headphones just because they're stylish, even though they sound like crap)
Have you never taken a road trip with a friend or SO and drive in shifts? An EV with a 4-16 hour recharge time won't work for that scenario. All EVs should include range extending generators. It would be a hybridization between electric and ICE vehicles. Oh I know - let's call it a hybrid car!
> Range anxiety that you point out is not the issue. It is charging time and charging availability anxiety. A bigger battery helps that somewhat but also makes the issue even worse. Once those issues are worked out this will be a silly conversation. For example if there was 1 gas station in my state I would not think 'man gas cars are amazing'. No, I would be thinking 'not going to buy that'.
I'll be sticking with ICE vehicles for the forseeable future thanks to the 3 minute "recharge" time. As much as I like the Tesla... I am not willing to deal with range and recharge time issues. Sure I could get a half charge in 20 minutes - IF I can find a supercharger... but why waste my time stopping every 120-150 miles to recharge - and if it goes flat, having to get a flatbed to haul the car to a charger?
If only there were a solution to this problem. If only there were some way to have an on-board charging system, perhaps one driven by gasoline, diesel, or kerosene, where an engine (be it piston, rotary, or turbine) could spin up a generator, or if the battery is close to flat and you really, really need to get where you are going, perhaps include a PTO to connect that engine to the drivetrain. I would call this sort of vehicle a "hybrid car" because it would combine the best of EVs and the best of ICE.
Sersiouly... I'll buy a Tesla when they adopt the i3/Volt/Karma approach.
Not really. An electrician may be required for the electrical service (connecting the breaker box to the meter) and to charge the HVAC (I'd ignore that and just charge it - it's really not complicated to evacuate the system with a vaccuum pump and then fill it with refrigerant), but you can usually do the work on your own home and then get the local inspector to check it out and sign off providing everything is up to code. The trick is to find out where local codes are more strict than national building codes and exceed all of them so there is no reason for the inspector to not sign off on the work.
> Longitudinal data has repeatedly shown that "enterprise" drives have no technical or reliability advantage over consumer HDDs
Either they are lying, or you are, because there are firmware differences. Build a RAID5, RAID10, or RAID 6 array with consumer desktop drives, then build the same with NAS or enterprise drives. You will find that the consumer drives frequently get kicked out of the array due to timeouts on error correction, while the NAS and enterprise drives do not.
The differences are minor and firmware-related, but there are differences. You _can_ adjust the timeouts to make the desktop drives behave better in a RAID, but it won't be perfect and you still might encounter drives' dropping out of your array.
They'd also consider the New Testament to be leftist, social propaganda if the "Christian Right" bothered to read the fucking thing. They claim to worship Yeshua (aka Jesus), who was a dark-skinned liberal jew who spouted off liberal nonsense such as feeding the poor, housing the homeless, caring for the sick and disabled, caring for foreigners (indeed, to consider those who sojourn among us as born in the land), and to not judge unrighteously.
They are committing the sin of sodom (Ezekiel 16:48-60) and are the very pharisees whom Yeshua ("Jesus" if you prefer the anglicized name) condemned in Matthew 23, Matthew 25. Their god is the almighty dollar, not the black leftist socialist Jew they claim to worship.
If the Bible is true and the final judgement is actually a thing, they will hear "Depart from me, for I never knew you."
So, now they make their systems non-memory-expandable, and just as desktop chipsets increase RAM capacity to 64GB, they decide to offer 32GB of soldered-on chips. Very nice. Yes, I did RTFA, and their reasoning is largely bullshit. It's more of "Buy what you need now, and if your needs change in a few months, don't worry about upgrading; we'll happily sell you a new shiny with more RAM! Just chuck your old shiny in the landfill."
> But I can't buy a phone that doesn't have expandable non-cloud storage. I use cloud storage TOO but that's not what I want when I get on a plane and want to watch movies, play games, and read books.
----
> I also wouldn't touch one without a headphone socket. That's just stupid and somehow the fad infected the industry.
The "somehow the fad infected the industry" = "And of course, you will want these convenient $130 wireless, easy-to-use, inferior-sounding, needing-to-rechage-every-few-hours earbuds. Would you like them in black or white? We also have rose gold, for a mere $20 more."
----
> Boy, do I want the "modular phone" idea to take out. Gimme a base phone with 20 module ports on it for anything from Bluetooth, GPS, IR, headphones or whatever and I'd spend twice as much on modules as the actual phone itself.
Every few years, a few laptop makers get together and propose modular, upgradeable platforms... but no products EVER come out of it because they decide the upgradable model is bad for business rather than building ewaste. ewaste is far more profitable.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet, there are patents methods for swinging on a swing (thousands of years of prior art), and stuff like toolbars. Obviousness to those skilled in the art hasn't been a test for patents for at least a couple of decades. Many trivial patents are now being issued - including stuff that has been "public knowledge" already.
YOU ARE CORRECT. I AM NODDING MY CRANIAL UNIT IN AGREEMENT - A HUMAN ACTION.
TOTALLY NOT A ROBOT.
----
ah fuck I forgot the slashdot lame filter and the one time I ever need to make an all caps post I am unable to do so. as such I will type a bit more and hopefully get by the lameness filter.
I had lots of movies and I sought out letterboxed editions. They were hard to find but did exist. I still have a good number of them, and still have two S-VHS VCRs I have in my AV rack but haven't connected or powered on in quite a few years. Also, I seem to remember there was a huge company which littered the landscape that was full of VHS tapes to rent. Perhaps you've heard of "Blockbuster?"
The reason VHS went away was the same as cassettes, and 8-tracks before them; relatively poor quality and sequential access vs. random access, and then you consider that magnetic tapes degrade with every pass over the heads, and if there is anything wrong with EITHER the cassette OR the player, or if the humidity is just a hair too high, the tape will get "eaten" by the player. Then, there are tracking issues; the last-generation VHS players autotracked well, but previous generation VHS players were mostly equipped with manual tracking adjustment. Finally, VHS can only record or play at a given time, while DVRs can record multiple shows while playing one (or more if you stream to another device!) back. You can make a VCR eat or jam a tape quite easily; fast forward just a little, stop. Fast forward a little, stop, Rewind a little, stop. Repeat the cycle until the tape is uneven on the spool. Now play it - if it's just a little too humid, or if the VCR's tape path isn't pristine, the tape will either jam or get eaten. To correct this, when you notice the spools are not level, is to fully fast-forward the tape to the end, and fully rewind it.
It was an awful medium and very unreliable compared to both optical disks and solid state storage.
When DVD came out, VHS and VCR sales slowed down. When DVD recorders and DVD camcorders came out, VCR sales slowed even more. When DVRs went mainstream, and camcorders went solid-state storage, and streaming (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) picked up steam, the few remaining VCR sales dried up instantly and movie rental chains vanished.
At all. In fact, many people used to complain about letterbox DVDs, because "it doesn't fill my screen" so the actual buyer preferences are quite the opposite of what you're saying. In fact one time while browsing for DVDs at I talked to one such idiot at Wal*Mart because she was complaining about letterboxed movies. I mentioned to her "You do realize that pan & scan hides about half the scene from your view, right?" She didn't want to hear it. She was convinced pan & scan is the superior experience and showed you more of the scene. (Yes, she is an idiot)
There's a million reasons vhs died, but it wasn't the reason you cited.
> They don't do "punitive damages" in the UK. A court will only order compensation for actual damages suffered, which must be properly justified, not just a big made-up number. Of course, $10M might be a reasonable claim in some situations, if you were a high-earner and your career really had been destroyed.
In this case a couple million would be the MINIMUM appropriate compensation because dismissal of wrongful charges that were pressed due to gross negligence does not remove the mindshare and all the incorrect news articles which will come up during employment vetting processes; he may encounter problems seeking employment in the future and not even get called for interviews when he submits his CV. At minimum 2-3mil would be just compensation so that he does not suffer poverty resulting from government malfeasance.
Fair enough but then you're increasing fuel and vehicle costs and creating a new logistics problem.
Good luck with that. Radio Trash abandoned their core market in the '90s and has since gone bankrupt. Twice.
> A person cannot drive on the road without a driving test, so why should a car?
They're doing the driving tests now. The next step (allowing the drivers who passed to drive without a veteran driver present) is what this is about. Currently autonomous vehicles are essentially on their learner's permits. Once they pass the driving test and get their license, why not let them drive without the veteran driver's presence?
You started on a good analogy and then veered off the road with it. ;)
Truck drivers will still be needed for the last mile delivery. I don't think shippers will come up with a robot nimble and clever enough to deliver appliances and fitness equipment into homes (and unpack and install them when contracted to).
However this reminds me of our heading toward a 60% unemployment rate due to automation (store checkouts, stock clerks, fast food jobs, etc. are gradually going away. This is evident in many NYC pharmacy/convenience stores, for example) - what are we going to do about this? If we were smart we would be expanding socialism in a huge way, not dismantling the feeble socialist safety nets we now have in place as the GOP is hell-bent on doing (nice Christian family values they have there, with their shitting on the poor, disabled, and sick!).
Anyway... back to the topic: I don't see the need for last-mile delivery jobs going away any time soon because of the complexity of on-premises delivery. Eventually, though, robotics and AI will advance to the point where even those problems are figured out, and once those problems are figured out (how to get a robot to navigate bulky packages through odd stairwells and hallways, etc.) they will likely do a better job than humans. Honestly though... I'd kind of prefer it in some ways, because artificial delays like "we do that route only one day a week" and the first available delivery date is three weeks out, when the package has been within a few miles of you for a week already will go away. They'll just send out a robot with your package as soon as they arrive at the warehouse. (Today, freight shipping still sucks warm sweaty donkey balls; ecommerce hasn't revolutionized freight delivery times like it has small package delivery)
Check the top 200. You'll see The Beatles in there. What is surprising though is Pink Floyd's DSotM is absent.
I'll only believe their intentions are good if they ban Trump. He's the biggest troll on there right now.
The sad thing is that carbon-zinc cells are still offered for sale - and people still buy them because they're cheap... >_>
> This has been the worst thing MS has ever done to a GUI interface.....and now, Libre has copied the abomination.
Although it is only alpha quality now (it is not feature complete and you need to turn on experimental features to enable the ribbon bar) it is already better than Microsoft's implementation, because you can keep the menubar AND display the ribbon bar simultaneously!
go to tools -> options -> advanced and tick "Enable experimental features"
click view -> Toolbar layout -> notebookbar
click the little icon on the left of the File tab, then select menubar
This solves the MAJOR problem with the ribbon bar concept that I had with Microsoft Office; instead of keeping both the advanced menu and the ribbon bar, Microsoft chose to sack the menu and show only the ribbon bar with its sometimes-meaningless icons, leading users on a wild goose chase. Had Microsoft Office included BOTH the menu bar AND the ribbon bar, I'd probably have given the ribbon bar more of a chance.
Even that would be an improvement. If they were to offer that as an option, I would buy a Tesla.
I still prefer the idea of a gas turbine engine running at peak efficiency rapid charging the battery cell as needed, and they're compact enough that it would not require a whole lot of space for installation; the fuel tank (which I would imagine would only require 15L-20L gal of fuel) would likely be larger than the turbine-driven generator... plus a gas turbine engine would sound really cool! ;) (I'm only partly kidding about that... some folks might actually buy one just to hear the turbine. I mean, people buy crap "beats" headphones just because they're stylish, even though they sound like crap)
Have you never taken a road trip with a friend or SO and drive in shifts?
An EV with a 4-16 hour recharge time won't work for that scenario. All EVs should include range extending generators. It would be a hybridization between electric and ICE vehicles. Oh I know - let's call it a hybrid car!
> Range anxiety that you point out is not the issue. It is charging time and charging availability anxiety. A bigger battery helps that somewhat but also makes the issue even worse. Once those issues are worked out this will be a silly conversation. For example if there was 1 gas station in my state I would not think 'man gas cars are amazing'. No, I would be thinking 'not going to buy that'.
I'll be sticking with ICE vehicles for the forseeable future thanks to the 3 minute "recharge" time. As much as I like the Tesla... I am not willing to deal with range and recharge time issues. Sure I could get a half charge in 20 minutes - IF I can find a supercharger... but why waste my time stopping every 120-150 miles to recharge - and if it goes flat, having to get a flatbed to haul the car to a charger?
If only there were a solution to this problem. If only there were some way to have an on-board charging system, perhaps one driven by gasoline, diesel, or kerosene, where an engine (be it piston, rotary, or turbine) could spin up a generator, or if the battery is close to flat and you really, really need to get where you are going, perhaps include a PTO to connect that engine to the drivetrain. I would call this sort of vehicle a "hybrid car" because it would combine the best of EVs and the best of ICE.
Sersiouly... I'll buy a Tesla when they adopt the i3/Volt/Karma approach.
> Who puts in wiring before fitting plasterboard?
Everyone.
Not really.
An electrician may be required for the electrical service (connecting the breaker box to the meter) and to charge the HVAC (I'd ignore that and just charge it - it's really not complicated to evacuate the system with a vaccuum pump and then fill it with refrigerant), but you can usually do the work on your own home and then get the local inspector to check it out and sign off providing everything is up to code. The trick is to find out where local codes are more strict than national building codes and exceed all of them so there is no reason for the inspector to not sign off on the work.
> As a small business owner paying 25-50% tax, how are you supposed to compete against companies that end up paying 0.005%?
You're not, and that is by design.
> Longitudinal data has repeatedly shown that "enterprise" drives have no technical or reliability advantage over consumer HDDs
Either they are lying, or you are, because there are firmware differences. Build a RAID5, RAID10, or RAID 6 array with consumer desktop drives, then build the same with NAS or enterprise drives. You will find that the consumer drives frequently get kicked out of the array due to timeouts on error correction, while the NAS and enterprise drives do not.
The differences are minor and firmware-related, but there are differences. You _can_ adjust the timeouts to make the desktop drives behave better in a RAID, but it won't be perfect and you still might encounter drives' dropping out of your array.
*fewer
Newsflash: sex isn't binary, after all, and intersex people are collateral damage in the pseudochristian jihad against LGBT folk:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.isna.org/faq/what_i...
http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
They'd also consider the New Testament to be leftist, social propaganda if the "Christian Right" bothered to read the fucking thing.
They claim to worship Yeshua (aka Jesus), who was a dark-skinned liberal jew who spouted off liberal nonsense such as feeding the poor, housing the homeless, caring for the sick and disabled, caring for foreigners (indeed, to consider those who sojourn among us as born in the land), and to not judge unrighteously.
They are committing the sin of sodom (Ezekiel 16:48-60) and are the very pharisees whom Yeshua ("Jesus" if you prefer the anglicized name) condemned in Matthew 23, Matthew 25. Their god is the almighty dollar, not the black leftist socialist Jew they claim to worship.
If the Bible is true and the final judgement is actually a thing, they will hear "Depart from me, for I never knew you."
What do the adverts on TV and radio say?
"OWN $Movie/$TVShow on DVD or Blu-Ray today!"
You OWN that COPY. What you do not have is the right to redistribute.
So, now they make their systems non-memory-expandable, and just as desktop chipsets increase RAM capacity to 64GB, they decide to offer 32GB of soldered-on chips. Very nice.
Yes, I did RTFA, and their reasoning is largely bullshit. It's more of "Buy what you need now, and if your needs change in a few months, don't worry about upgrading; we'll happily sell you a new shiny with more RAM! Just chuck your old shiny in the landfill."
THIS:
> But I can't buy a phone that doesn't have expandable non-cloud storage. I use cloud storage TOO but that's not what I want when I get on a plane and want to watch movies, play games, and read books.
----
> I also wouldn't touch one without a headphone socket. That's just stupid and somehow the fad infected the industry.
The "somehow the fad infected the industry" = "And of course, you will want these convenient $130 wireless, easy-to-use, inferior-sounding, needing-to-rechage-every-few-hours earbuds. Would you like them in black or white? We also have rose gold, for a mere $20 more."
----
> Boy, do I want the "modular phone" idea to take out. Gimme a base phone with 20 module ports on it for anything from Bluetooth, GPS, IR, headphones or whatever and I'd spend twice as much on modules as the actual phone itself.
Every few years, a few laptop makers get together and propose modular, upgradeable platforms... but no products EVER come out of it because they decide the upgradable model is bad for business rather than building ewaste. ewaste is far more profitable.