One person's poor decision is another person's awesome decision. Let's use a different car company - Ferrari. Nobody buys a Ferrari because of the reliability ratings in Consumer Reports. They buy it because of the looks, the performance, the badge, or other reasons. The decision tree and evaluation of satisfaction about the purchase simply won't be based on whether it is as reliable as a Toyota Camry. Tesla is somewhat in the same boat. Reliability is pretty far down the list of reasons why someone buys a Tesla in most cases.
Plus, in my mind, there's two categories of reliability: 1. How likely is something major going wrong that's going to leave you stranded and incur massive repair costs 2. How many mostly unnecessary widgets are there that will inevitably break at some point
Teslas (and any other purely electric car) should be really good on the first category due to the far simpler electric drive train. Any late-model luxury vehicle (and, increasingly, mid-range ones) will core poorly on the second category, due to the sheer weight of silly gadgetry they come with.
Have you actually been to an iPic theater? I don't generally go see many movies in a theater (maybe once a year), but I ONLY go to iPic when I do. Precisely because they don't suffer from most of the problems you mention. Reserved seats when you purchase your ticket. No one else sitting within 6ft or so of me and my GF. Generally, by 10 minutes in, I've forgotten we're not the only ones there. Of course the tickets are more expensive, and the food/drinks are overpriced, but at least the tickets include popcorn.
What is the difference if you are not prepared? Will you fail at it?
Quite possibly...
Imagine this scenario: You're halfway there, and part of the life support system break down, and can't be fixed en route. The vessel can now only support half of the people on board. If the passengers aren't prepared to calmly figure out who stays and who goes, and half the people aren't prepared to go quietly, the resulting riot will probably doom the entire mission.
Unpleasant contingency plans for that sort of thing have to be made, and the passengers must be prepared to follow them. There won't be any lifeboats.
C"mon, we're talking 10000 acres here. 4000 hectares for those who can't be bothered to learn more than one way to measure things. The USA, currently, has something like 750 million acres of forest (300M hectares). So this 10K acres amounts to 0.00133% of the US forest land. Assuming the entire 10K acres is/was forest.
Not to mention that wildfires are a natural occurrence, and part of the forest life cycle. If they didn't threaten human stuff, the best thing to do would be to let them (the naturally caused ones, anyway) burn themselves out.
There are very good reasons we don't allow Doctor Mom to build her own x-ray machine to save a buck. Just because this medical device is simple doesn't mean it isn't a medical grade device that should be constructed in your Maker lab.
Except that if you're highly allergic to something, you risk a good chance of death by NOT having an EpiPen or similar around. If you simply don't have the obscene amount of money they're asking for them, your choices are: 1. Risk death by not having an EpiPen(cil) 2. Risk death (but probably much less so) by constructing your own.
Which would you pick?
Unfortunately, with our idiotic healthcare system here in the US, that logic applies to more than just epinephrine.
This will be a continuing problem so long as the people who own the infrastructure also sell services over it.
They almost got this right with the ILEC/CLEC split with DSL. The only problem is that they let the ILEC sell services over the infrastructure they owned.
Don't let the guys who own the wires sell any services and this problem will fix itself.
And don't let anyone who owns wires or provides service also create/sell content.
This has no place on slashdot. It is extremely offensive to the memory of a once fantastic tech site.
Slashdot Editors' Health Concerns Serious, Say Most Commenters in Slashdot Poll.
85.3% think frequent dupes evidence of Alzheimer's. 92.12343% consider recent story selection the result of brain damage from a serious concussion. 5% think editors really born in CowboyNealistan, demand to see birth certificates.
Why the hell should anyone care about abstract "people"? I'mm not wired that way, we care about those we know, not about anyone I don't know.
I fixed that for you. There ar ea lot of peopel in this world. Some do not care about anyone outside their immediate or extended family - in fact, some have a great fear outside of their "friend zone". Some don't care about anyone at all. And despite your assertions, there are those among us who actually do care about the future and the people in it.
You shouldn't presume to speak for all of humanity.
I think it might be more accurate to say that most people actually do care. BUT, they also realize that absolutely nothing they do on an individual level will have any impact whatsoever - everyone has to do it, or it's wasted effort. So there's very little incentive to make one's own life more expensive and less pleasant when everyone around you *appears* to not care (because they also all see everyone else not doing anything).
Once SpaceX starts flying those "used" cores it will push the whole industry of space flight to the same level of reuse. We are going to see some great advances in engineering coming from all over the world as others start to catch up to SpaceX.
Another interesting thing that might result from reuse: I keep hearing people say, "who would risk their expensive cargo on a used booster?" I wonder if it won't actually turn out that the second, and maybe even third flights of a given booster prove to be more reliable than the first. (basically natural selection rocket-style)
Are we forgetting that indie game developers are still frequently one programmer and one artist? Fez, Terraria, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Shovel Knight and Undertale are all games made by unbelievably tiny teams.
And, IMO, the games are way more fun, even if they're a bit less shiny.
That embarassment will make sure they hire more staff and put more money in IT funding.
You haven't worked in enterprise IT for long, have you? An embarrassment like this will make them flog their existing staff harder, insist on more metrics to measure performance, more boxes on the audit form to tick, more mandatory unpaid overtime. But little chance they'll actually spend more money on the IT cost center.
Depends. What situations like this do is put a pretty firm dollar amount on the failures that IT asks for $X to mitigate/prevent. That way, next time they ask for $400k for something to avoid a $2M problem, they can ask in a language that upper management understands, and have memorable evidence to back them up.
Sad that management won't trust the expensive experts they hire, but sometimes it takes an expensive lesson for them to learn (just sucks that the customers usually get screwed in the process).
IMHO, the posted speed limit is for either A) the driver with dementia who shouldn't be driving anyway, or B) some government that needs the speeding fines to balance their budget.
You forgot C) the lowest common denominator of equipment condition. Vehicle inspection standards in the US are a joke, and there's a lot of cars on the road that shouldn't be going 40 MPH, let alone 80.
This "article" screams intern assignment. The premise is predetermined and everything that goes against it is ignored. There are so many part pickers and guides available through a single search it's frustrating and stupefying that someone would even try writing this.
Likewise, building a PC now is nothing close to what it used to take. How would have this person felt trying to configure their IRQ interrupts? Not well, I'm guessing.
All told, it is sad that/. even allowed this to be submitted. This is an article in search of something to be upset about.
You missed the part where the author complains about the "unreasonable" cost, then turns around and lauds Apple...:P
I know for a fact, that if someone in *my* group were to quit, it would totally fuck over for my vacation plans, and I would lose a LOT of money.
If I had pre-approved vacation with a lot of non-refundable money invested, I would expect the company to reimburse me if they demand I cancel it. In fact, their refusing to do so would be one of those situations where I might quit without notice. It might very well cost me less to go unpaid for the two or three weeks it took to land another job than to cancel the vacation plans! Either get by without me, or hire a contractor.
Why does everyone have to find a new car? I could easily afford a new car, but my last 3 purchases have all been for cars that are 2-4 years old. You save thousands of dollars that way, and you still have a very good car that will last you for years (provided you've done your research).
As soon as I saw the headline I thought "since when does the typical family buy a new car?" Upper middle class families can do that, but smarter upper middle class people aren't obsessed with being the first owner of a car, since you have to pay a huge premium for that privilege.
I think a lot of people that *can* afford a new car can *because* they don't buy/lease new cars every few years...:P
I work with a group of people all making six figures. Guess what we drive? 2x used BMWs, 2x used Mercedes, 1x used Porsche, used Audi, and my Toyota that will be old enough to drive itself this year (the only one that was bought new by one of us). The people making less are the ones with the new cars, for some reason.
Globally, the quality of employees performing embedded-systems programming for consumer products is dismal.
It's kind of scary, really. My dad spent decades as an electrical engineer designing ASICs. He lamented that almost the entire last 10 years of his career, he spent following the new generation of EEs around fixing all of their stupid mistakes. And this was for "important" stuff; stuff that he was never able to provide any more detail to me about than "I'm designing a DSP chip" because of classifications; stuff that if my speculation is correct, might get our soldiers killed if it goes awry.
I'm sure some of that is just the natural order of senior people backing up the less experienced, but he was getting to the point that he wondered what would happen to his projects after he retired - all they hired was fresh college grads.
Commonly that's not seen as a good way. In such situation, the use of deadly force is deemed acceptable in defence of the crew IIRC (and even then often not used, for fear of escalation). But if there is no crew... This is a bit like setting booby traps in your home to nail burglars: if the trap actuall injures or kills the burglar, you're off to jail according to the law in a good many countries.
I would imagine a totally autonomous ship could have all internal spaces kept flooded with nitrogen or carbon dioxide as a fire suppression measure. No need for poison or anything malicious, when anyone that goes in without proper gear suffocates.
Yeah... my first reaction was "duh, just look at all the people that buy ginormous SUV's to protect themselves at the expense of everyone they might hit."
It is not how much it costs, it is how much people can afford to pay. For the average Chinese resident 3000 Yuan can easily be their entire wages for the month. So here they price the bikes accordingly. It is just like you can buy a new car for $15000 or you can buy a Ferrari for several hundred thousand. The cost to assemble a Ferrari is more expensive but not 10 times more expensive.
The problem is that the companies making stuff want to be able to hire someone in $CHEAP_COUNTRY for $X/10, instead of someone in $EXPENSIVE_COUNTRY for $X. But then want to be able to sell it in $CHEAP_COUNTRY for $Y and in $EXPENSIVE_COUNTRY for $Y*10. Then they bitch and moan and buy off politicians in order to prevent people from buying it where it's cheap and bringing it to where it's not, while they do exactly the same thing with labor.
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One person's poor decision is another person's awesome decision. Let's use a different car company - Ferrari. Nobody buys a Ferrari because of the reliability ratings in Consumer Reports. They buy it because of the looks, the performance, the badge, or other reasons. The decision tree and evaluation of satisfaction about the purchase simply won't be based on whether it is as reliable as a Toyota Camry. Tesla is somewhat in the same boat. Reliability is pretty far down the list of reasons why someone buys a Tesla in most cases.
Plus, in my mind, there's two categories of reliability:
1. How likely is something major going wrong that's going to leave you stranded and incur massive repair costs
2. How many mostly unnecessary widgets are there that will inevitably break at some point
Teslas (and any other purely electric car) should be really good on the first category due to the far simpler electric drive train.
Any late-model luxury vehicle (and, increasingly, mid-range ones) will core poorly on the second category, due to the sheer weight of silly gadgetry they come with.
Have you actually been to an iPic theater? I don't generally go see many movies in a theater (maybe once a year), but I ONLY go to iPic when I do. Precisely because they don't suffer from most of the problems you mention. Reserved seats when you purchase your ticket. No one else sitting within 6ft or so of me and my GF. Generally, by 10 minutes in, I've forgotten we're not the only ones there. Of course the tickets are more expensive, and the food/drinks are overpriced, but at least the tickets include popcorn.
What is the difference if you are not prepared? Will you fail at it?
Quite possibly...
Imagine this scenario: You're halfway there, and part of the life support system break down, and can't be fixed en route. The vessel can now only support half of the people on board. If the passengers aren't prepared to calmly figure out who stays and who goes, and half the people aren't prepared to go quietly, the resulting riot will probably doom the entire mission.
Unpleasant contingency plans for that sort of thing have to be made, and the passengers must be prepared to follow them. There won't be any lifeboats.
C"mon, we're talking 10000 acres here. 4000 hectares for those who can't be bothered to learn more than one way to measure things. The USA, currently, has something like 750 million acres of forest (300M hectares). So this 10K acres amounts to 0.00133% of the US forest land. Assuming the entire 10K acres is/was forest.
Not to mention that wildfires are a natural occurrence, and part of the forest life cycle. If they didn't threaten human stuff, the best thing to do would be to let them (the naturally caused ones, anyway) burn themselves out.
There are very good reasons we don't allow Doctor Mom to build her own x-ray machine to save a buck. Just because this medical device is simple doesn't mean it isn't a medical grade device that should be constructed in your Maker lab.
Except that if you're highly allergic to something, you risk a good chance of death by NOT having an EpiPen or similar around. If you simply don't have the obscene amount of money they're asking for them, your choices are:
1. Risk death by not having an EpiPen(cil)
2. Risk death (but probably much less so) by constructing your own.
Which would you pick?
Unfortunately, with our idiotic healthcare system here in the US, that logic applies to more than just epinephrine.
This will be a continuing problem so long as the people who own the infrastructure also sell services over it.
They almost got this right with the ILEC/CLEC split with DSL. The only problem is that they let the ILEC sell services over the infrastructure they owned.
Don't let the guys who own the wires sell any services and this problem will fix itself.
And don't let anyone who owns wires or provides service also create/sell content.
This has no place on slashdot. It is extremely offensive to the memory of a once fantastic tech site.
Slashdot Editors' Health Concerns Serious, Say Most Commenters in Slashdot Poll.
85.3% think frequent dupes evidence of Alzheimer's.
92.12343% consider recent story selection the result of brain damage from a serious concussion.
5% think editors really born in CowboyNealistan, demand to see birth certificates.
That's not even the worst of it!
Employees went so far as to create phony PIN numbers
The PIN numbers weren't even real! It's amazing this fraud was detected at all, they looked just like actual PIN numbers!
My PIN isn't real, either. It's 342i
Goober :P
Why the hell should anyone care about abstract "people"? I'mm not wired that way, we care about those we know, not about anyone I don't know .
I fixed that for you. There ar ea lot of peopel in this world. Some do not care about anyone outside their immediate or extended family - in fact, some have a great fear outside of their "friend zone". Some don't care about anyone at all. And despite your assertions, there are those among us who actually do care about the future and the people in it.
You shouldn't presume to speak for all of humanity.
I think it might be more accurate to say that most people actually do care. BUT, they also realize that absolutely nothing they do on an individual level will have any impact whatsoever - everyone has to do it, or it's wasted effort. So there's very little incentive to make one's own life more expensive and less pleasant when everyone around you *appears* to not care (because they also all see everyone else not doing anything).
Once SpaceX starts flying those "used" cores it will push the whole industry of space flight to the same level of reuse. We are going to see some great advances in engineering coming from all over the world as others start to catch up to SpaceX.
Another interesting thing that might result from reuse: I keep hearing people say, "who would risk their expensive cargo on a used booster?" I wonder if it won't actually turn out that the second, and maybe even third flights of a given booster prove to be more reliable than the first. (basically natural selection rocket-style)
Are we forgetting that indie game developers are still frequently one programmer and one artist? Fez, Terraria, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Shovel Knight and Undertale are all games made by unbelievably tiny teams.
And, IMO, the games are way more fun, even if they're a bit less shiny.
I think we should simply remove weapons and weapon words from the english language. This should surely create a safer society.
That's actually a great idea. Can't ban something that you can't refer to in legislation! :D
That embarassment will make sure they hire more staff and put more money in IT funding.
You haven't worked in enterprise IT for long, have you? An embarrassment like this will make them flog their existing staff harder, insist on more metrics to measure performance, more boxes on the audit form to tick, more mandatory unpaid overtime. But little chance they'll actually spend more money on the IT cost center.
Depends. What situations like this do is put a pretty firm dollar amount on the failures that IT asks for $X to mitigate/prevent. That way, next time they ask for $400k for something to avoid a $2M problem, they can ask in a language that upper management understands, and have memorable evidence to back them up.
Sad that management won't trust the expensive experts they hire, but sometimes it takes an expensive lesson for them to learn (just sucks that the customers usually get screwed in the process).
IMHO, the posted speed limit is for either A) the driver with dementia who shouldn't be driving anyway, or B) some government that needs the speeding fines to balance their budget.
You forgot C) the lowest common denominator of equipment condition. Vehicle inspection standards in the US are a joke, and there's a lot of cars on the road that shouldn't be going 40 MPH, let alone 80.
This "article" screams intern assignment. The premise is predetermined and everything that goes against it is ignored. There are so many part pickers and guides available through a single search it's frustrating and stupefying that someone would even try writing this.
Likewise, building a PC now is nothing close to what it used to take. How would have this person felt trying to configure their IRQ interrupts? Not well, I'm guessing.
All told, it is sad that /. even allowed this to be submitted. This is an article in search of something to be upset about.
You missed the part where the author complains about the "unreasonable" cost, then turns around and lauds Apple... :P
I know for a fact, that if someone in *my* group were to quit, it would totally fuck over for my vacation plans, and I would lose a LOT of money.
If I had pre-approved vacation with a lot of non-refundable money invested, I would expect the company to reimburse me if they demand I cancel it. In fact, their refusing to do so would be one of those situations where I might quit without notice. It might very well cost me less to go unpaid for the two or three weeks it took to land another job than to cancel the vacation plans! Either get by without me, or hire a contractor.
According to AAA, an organization more reputable than Bankrate.com, the cost to own and drive a vehicle in the USA today is $8,558 per year.
Holy crap! $8,500? That seems really high. Here are my numbers:
2001 Toyota Solara (yearly, bought new):
Depreciation: $1700
Maint (avg): $500
Insurance: $1150
Gas: ~$1000-1200
Total: $4,550/yr
2008 Porsche Boxster S (yearly, bought used):
Depreciation: $1400
Maint: $800
Insurance: $1000
Gas: $1000-1200
Total: $4,400/yr
Am I missing something (other than the urge to go switch cars every three years)?
Why does everyone have to find a new car? I could easily afford a new car, but my last 3 purchases have all been for cars that are 2-4 years old. You save thousands of dollars that way, and you still have a very good car that will last you for years (provided you've done your research).
As soon as I saw the headline I thought "since when does the typical family buy a new car?" Upper middle class families can do that, but smarter upper middle class people aren't obsessed with being the first owner of a car, since you have to pay a huge premium for that privilege.
I think a lot of people that *can* afford a new car can *because* they don't buy/lease new cars every few years... :P
I work with a group of people all making six figures. Guess what we drive? 2x used BMWs, 2x used Mercedes, 1x used Porsche, used Audi, and my Toyota that will be old enough to drive itself this year (the only one that was bought new by one of us). The people making less are the ones with the new cars, for some reason.
Globally, the quality of employees performing embedded-systems programming for consumer products is dismal.
It's kind of scary, really. My dad spent decades as an electrical engineer designing ASICs. He lamented that almost the entire last 10 years of his career, he spent following the new generation of EEs around fixing all of their stupid mistakes. And this was for "important" stuff; stuff that he was never able to provide any more detail to me about than "I'm designing a DSP chip" because of classifications; stuff that if my speculation is correct, might get our soldiers killed if it goes awry.
I'm sure some of that is just the natural order of senior people backing up the less experienced, but he was getting to the point that he wondered what would happen to his projects after he retired - all they hired was fresh college grads.
Commonly that's not seen as a good way. In such situation, the use of deadly force is deemed acceptable in defence of the crew IIRC (and even then often not used, for fear of escalation). But if there is no crew... This is a bit like setting booby traps in your home to nail burglars: if the trap actuall injures or kills the burglar, you're off to jail according to the law in a good many countries.
I would imagine a totally autonomous ship could have all internal spaces kept flooded with nitrogen or carbon dioxide as a fire suppression measure. No need for poison or anything malicious, when anyone that goes in without proper gear suffocates.
People value their own lives..
Yeah... my first reaction was "duh, just look at all the people that buy ginormous SUV's to protect themselves at the expense of everyone they might hit."
Since Colorado legalized marijuana there has been a 300% increase in hospital visits related to marijuana usage.
You don't suppose that might be because people avoided actually seeking medical care before, because they were afraid of getting into legal trouble?
From that point of view, the 300% increase would be a positive outcome.
It is not how much it costs, it is how much people can afford to pay. For the average Chinese resident 3000 Yuan can easily be their entire wages for the month. So here they price the bikes accordingly. It is just like you can buy a new car for $15000 or you can buy a Ferrari for several hundred thousand. The cost to assemble a Ferrari is more expensive but not 10 times more expensive.
The problem is that the companies making stuff want to be able to hire someone in $CHEAP_COUNTRY for $X/10, instead of someone in $EXPENSIVE_COUNTRY for $X. But then want to be able to sell it in $CHEAP_COUNTRY for $Y and in $EXPENSIVE_COUNTRY for $Y*10. Then they bitch and moan and buy off politicians in order to prevent people from buying it where it's cheap and bringing it to where it's not, while they do exactly the same thing with labor.
No.
It's not the bandwidth-- it's just that video is too damn slow.
Still, though, productivity will skyrocket, because I'll finally have the "it uses too much bandwidth" excuse to block FB at the firewall.