If a home user (including light industrial like farms) can generate for less than the grid cost, why isn't the grid using Diesel and doing it cheaper?
This isn't about "Diesel", this is about the abuses of a privatized utility.
This. The fine article mentions Queensland. in the 00's Queensland privatised much of its electricity infrastructure and pretty much all of the retail. Since then the price of electricity has been pushed higher. I'd be surprised to find that the private electricity providers weren't trying to price rural users off the grid so they can bump up their profit.
I used to live in a mining town, it was cheaper for the company to run their own generators to supply the town as well as the site than to pay for scheme power.
in all fairness, these studios are trying to protect what's theirs.
It isn't actually "theirs".
Copyright is a legal contract between artists and the public to grant a limited monopoly over distribution in exchange for releasing their works into the public domain after the copyright duration.
Now you'll notice that it says "artist", not "content owner" and that it also says "limited". Copyright was originally limited to 20 years. However no significant amount of content has entered the public domain since the 1940's. In fact they keep extending copyright in order to prevent any work from being entered into the public domain.
So it seems the "content owners" are not keeping their end of the bargain... so why should we keep ours?
They are trying to restrict competition, so piracy became their competition.
Also I've spoken to several artists about this, their responses have always been the same. They dont care that I pirated their albums, in fact it helps them. What they want me to do is keep coming to their shows because thats where they make their money.
While I'm as libretarian as the next guy, and love "stick it to the man movements",
So basically you're saying your retarded.
And in all probability, a content cartel shill.
Living in southern England, daylight savings time is fucking brilliant.
In June we're in DST, BST or British Summer Time (UTC +1), the sun comes up at 04:45-05:00 and sets at 21:30. This means we have daylight from 04:15 until 22:30 in the peak of summer. It sucks enough when its 5:00 and broad daylight, I'd hate for the sun to be coming up at half past 3 in the mornings. Daylight Savings also means that if you finish work at 5 PM, there's still enough time to do a lot of summer activities. Hell you can even go to the beach at 7PM if you wanted.
I used to live in Western Australia, they were backwards when it came to DST. Days were a bit shorter but in summer, the sun would be up at 05:30 so it would start getting light from 04:30. It would start getting dark around 19:30 and be twilight by 20:00. Given how much Perthites go on and on about beaches and outdoor activities (it's not like there is really anything else Perth has going for it) you'd think that they'd be a prime candidate for DST to get an extra hour of outdoors activities each day.
Hell no, the backwards people of Perth rejected DST because, and these are genuine excuses, the curtains might fade and the cows wont know what time to get milked. Glad I moved out of that nightmare.
As Uber continues to brush its teeth, Google scrambles to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I'm not sure a judge can order Uber to selectively forget the stolen designs. Is the idea a permanent block on Uber running self-driving cars? TFA's unclear.
Actually courts can do quite a lot.
They can prohibit Uber from using self driving technology all together.
If the batteries will be made in Nevada, and shipped to Australia, I'm curious to know how they plan to transport them. It seems to me the most logical way would be by boat but could they get there quickly enough? If these are lithium ion batteries would it be possible to ship them by air given all the shipping restrictions that are placed on lithium ion batteries currently? If they go by boat how would they be packed to minimize the chance of a catastrophe en route?
I take it Elon Musk has never been to Australia, especially South Australia.
Around Australia there exists a rift in space and time that not only ensures there is a minimum 6 month wait time before something reaches Australia, but it also makes it cost twice as much. I call this the Oceanic Price Dilation Field (OPDF).
Besides, then the South Australian government will just go down to Bunnings and get it for 10% less.
Driver in a cab company is an employee of a public business. Public businesses do NOT have unlimited right of association - and are required to serve all members of hte public the same. It's called the Civil Rights Act.
Companies are not people and do not have, nor should they have, the same freedoms as individuals.
Whilst I agree with the second sentence.
Taxi's are under no obligation to pick up anyone and everyone. They can refuse to pick up drunk people for example, this is discrimination but not illegal discrimination. What they cannot do is discriminate on protected attributes like race, religion, social class, tax bracket, so on and so forth. A taxi cannot refuse to pick up someone because they're black, have ginger hair, is catholic or wants to go somewhere that is predominately occupied by blacks or gingers.
This is one of the more vital reasons we license taxi drivers. When they've proven to be discriminatory in an illegal fashion (including when they've said "no you're drunk" when what they really meant was "no, you're black") they can have their licenses revoked and livelihoods ruined. Whilst in the UK where I live this kind of racism was gone centuries ago, the US still has issues with it.
Sure that's funny and all, but how do I find the site for "Impossibly proportioned girls that want to date your testicles!"? I've been searching for that my whole life!
This.
And to add to this that a lot of content that is available on US Netflix is not available outside the US, even on Netflix. So if publishers are going to try to lock down their content, they can expect pirates.
I believe Gabe Newel, Brad Wardell (Of Stardock) as well as whoever is in charge of CD Projekt Red (GOG) have all said something along the lines of "pirates are just unserved customers".
In order for me to pay for some shows in the UK I need to wait for them to come out on DVD... that misses a huge window of opportunity for the vendor as I'm not going to wait six months for that to happen when I can just download them for free. Sure I feel a little bad for it... but then I think, fuck it, I tried to give them my money and they didn't want it. Hell, some shows dont even make it here on DVD.
If I told young people how much sex we had in the seventies, they wouldn't even believe it. The eighties were pretty good, too, and I understand the sixties were, as well. We are living in very conservative times, yet many seem not to realize it.
I think this is the root cause of it. Conservatives, especially religious conservatives are very anti-sex. Sex means people enjoying themselves, forgetting about the fabricated horrors that conservatives need to generate in order to stay in power. They try to paint sex as a shameful act as sex is a powerful enough drive that it erodes their hold over people.
I think a large part of the shaming culture has come from conservative sources, hell, their entire election campaign was based on trying to shame the opposition. I'm not just talking about Trump here, Cameron (UK) and Turnbull (Aus) did the same things in their election campaigns with the aid of Murdoch's media empire.
Japan is point in case for conservatism killing sex. The conservatives has pushed young people to the point where they no longer have the time or money to pursue complicated courting rituals. Now that is paying dividends in an aging nation.
If we want to have more sex (and better sex) we need to be more liberal. The sexual liberation of the late 60's was directly responsible for the sex in the seventies.
I use Apple Maps for navigation (it usually works better than Google Maps nav for me).
I use Google Maps because when I set the nav for Brighton, I dont want to end up in Northumberland.
I also dont care about traffic cameras and Google maps is the best I've seen for predicting traffic conditions and dealing with live traffic updates (which are quite good here in Southern England).
Evidence please? And not "it's been used 160,000 times".
A simple search in/. for "chatbot parking" turned up this previous article, which indicated that it successfully challenged 160,000 out of 250,000 tickets. So, no, not "it's been used 160,000 times". This is a "it's won 160,000 times". And that was as of June of last year. This NPR piece from earlier this year indicates that its up to 200,000 successful cases now in just three cities, and that its overall success rate with parking tickets stands at around 60%.
The question is, is 60% any better than any other methods. I'd say it's much lower than paying a lawyer at $400 an hour (I know a traffic lawyer who boasts a 90% sucess rate, thats where I got the $400 p/h figure from, I believe him because he doesn't take cases he's certain are going to lose). Here in the UK, the rule of thumb is, if it's issued by a local government, you need a bulletproof excuse to get out of it. If it's issued by a private corporation, just chuck it in the bin (so you don't get a fine for littering).
To issue fines, you need to either take it to court or have a remit from the government to do so. Pretty much the only organisations that I know of who have the power to do that without the local government doing the enforcing are universities (which have to have government issued charters to operate to begin with).
Rap is fucking garbage. People talk over a 8 second music loop and win Best Artist because they look good and dance around. There's no music being created anymore, it's all a sad performance for poor black people.
Apart from the poor bit (Rappers seem to have too much money) I agree completely.
However they're nowhere near as bad as electronic/dubstep. These are people who randomly throw together sounds like a 3 year old banging on pots and pans... No, wait, that is an insult to 3 year olds.
I'm certain I could write a script that could perform the same function. In fact, as soon as Japan solves the uncanny valley problem, all of the music chart will be virutal.
There's little wonder the newest song to be found in my car was from 2006. I miss the days where people could play an instrument and sang with their real voices. Of course the loudness war has a lot to answer for too.
I take instructions Waz gives me with a grain of salt these days, because something tricky it's telling you to do might give you an extra MINUTE vs. just stating on the highway... also Wze traffic understanding is inherently a little delayed.
I used Waze once because they had the Clarkson, Hammond and May voice set... which really just turned out to be mostly May. I've gone back to using Google Maps for navigation because Google Maps tells you which lanes to choose where as Waze doesn't.
"...because residential streets are designed for access, not throughput. And if they get misused, then that's bad."
BS. All roads are designed for "throughput", some for higher throughput that others. No road, however, is optimized for throughput since it's speed limit is set intentionally too low, at least in the US. Driving on a public road to get somewhere is NEVER misuse.
Here you lose all credibility in the argument. There is a hierarchy of roads. Local roads are for people to live on, these feed into collector roads, which feed to arterial routes which feed to freeways and highways. The more throughput you want, the more limited the access to the roadway and vice versa, the more people live on a road the lower throughput you want. Local roads really are just for starting and ending journeys.
Any properly designed city will be made so that people don't live on major thoroughfares. Of course given rather old cities like London, this isn't always possible. Anything in the US (which wasn't even a country when roads were invented) has no excuse except piss poor city planning.
We're talking about H1B's here. Imported labour. If their jobs could be offshored, they already would've been: the offshoring job-market favours capital even more than that for indentured brown people.
Its not quite that simple. There are costs to offshoring and not all of them are monetary. Customers dont like the delays you get with offshoring. Having an indentured brown person in strangling range is better than having one in some god-forsaken shithole. Not to mention the cost of hiring westerners to be ex-pat managers. A middle management flunkie that might get $40,000 if they're lucky will easily get an ex-pat package that costs 3-4 times as much.
So making it harder to bring over indentured brown people will easily offshore projects and services that might have stayed onshore.
That being said, I'm sure there are loopholes a plenty for this. Remember that the outsourcing industry didn't kick up a stink about Trump's decrees... because those had obvious loopholes that can be exploited. What they kicked up a stink over was the fact some upstart (with a D against their name) wanted to raise the minimum H1-B salary to US$130,000.
Computers were first built back in the 40's... we didn't get them into the home until the 70's.
The first transistor-based computers were in the early 1950's so that's when the clock should start ticking since valve-based computers were clearly never going to be a consumer item. The same may be true of the next generation of computer technology - the current tech for quantum computers is not really consumer friendly if that turns out to be the next generation technological platform.
Fair enough, it's 2:30 where I live and I didn't feel like reading the Wikipedia article on computers to get exact dates. However that's still 20 years from prototype to home product so I stand by my point.
I forget where I read it, (back in high school, which is a while ago for some of us) but it takes 25 years from the point where a new technology becomes available for it to integrate into our lives. Replacements for silicon are largely still theoretical.
UK is the same. We speak English and the universal language of shouting.
This. You can easily spot an Englishman overseas because he's the one who steadfastly believes that any language barrier can be broken simply by shouting loudly in English.
Not really, Apple offers good discounts to schools, they sometimes were cheaper than any other competitor. They really took Georing to heart when he said "Give me your children when they are 5 and I will have them for life" (quote from memory, so may be slightly wrong).
The problem is schools are now given funding based on performance in most western countries. Private schools depend on their graduates getting into good universities and universities depend on students getting good jobs to surivive.
This is important because as an employer, it's been a risk to employ anyone under 25 for any role involving a computer. The problem is, as I figure it, is that using a computer is taught by rote memorisation (to save, click this icon) and given that Apple does everything differently and the corporate world uses Windows this meant that people leaving high school and university were woefully uneducated when it came to using basic corporate tools like Word and Outlook. At one point, I was asking people if they used Windows or Mac at home and putting Mac users at the bottom of the pile (strangely enough, it was only the windows users who asked why this was important, the Mac users just blurted out their preference).
So it's less about cost and more about getting students prepared for a life of wage slavery. If students aren't getting good jobs, schools have failed because now they're measured on it.
Yes as in there is a limit to what we can do with silicon and transistors, but also no because of the way innovation tapers off after a few decades. Its the same reason that we dont see huge leaps in car, aeroplane and oven technology. Its because the design has matured to a point where for the most part we're just adding minor improvements to tried and tested designs. Intel/AMD/NVIDIA have pretty much reached this point and it will take a disruptive technology to change that.
Said disruption will likely be non-silicon or transistor based computers. However it will take 10-25 years for it to go from working prototype to household device. Computers were first built back in the 40's... we didn't get them into the home until the 70's. Even then the diffusion of innovation meant it was another 20 years before they were commonplace. We're up to the 90's if you're not keeping score. 27 years later, there isn't really anything that can be done to radically change existing designs, the last big innovation was changing to 64-bit and that was done in the early 00's. Much like with cars, all they are doing now is making minor changes, however over the course of a decade, these minor changes tend to make a big difference.
Also, this is why I didn't care about getting Skylake over Kaby Lake or a Geforce 10 over a Geforce 9 when I built my new gaming rig mid last year. I knew the difference would be minor (and it's easy to upgrade a GPU in 2 or 3 generations when a difference can be noticed).
I do, and I remember all the freakouts over the lack of SCSI and ADB ports, and on the Windows side of the aisle everyone insisting manufacturers NOT kill the PS/2 ports. Ultimately, the technology advances, and old ports aren't needed any more. You may very well find phones with headphone jacks for many years to come. But more and more, the industry will shift to wireless headphones, and those jacks will get less and less use. Kind of like those PS/2 ports that still ship on a few models of motherboards....
Actually, PS/2 still ships on a lot of mainboards. Only the cheapest of the cheap got rid of them, a £300 gaming motherboard will still have them.
Same with RS232 and LPT1 ports, although they have just been pins on the motherboard for a while now. Almost all KB's have been shipping as USB for over a decade now (probably closer to 15 years) and the port is still in use. The fact is, they're so cheap there's no point in getting rid of them when a tiny fraction of your market could still be using them.
However when it comes to headphone jacks, the overwhelming majority of people will still continue to use them. Wireless headphones have been on the market for years and have floundered because they all have some fundamental problems you cant get rid of, chief amongst them is the fact you have to charge the headphones, second to that is the fact Bluetooth is terrible for audio. Sorry fanboy, the headphone jack will be around for years to come.
You really think that the headphone jack is the culprit in Apple's market loss?
Sole culprit... No, but it does need to shoulder a large amount of the blame.
Apple has been steadily losing ground in it's established markets for years, they've offset this by entering new markets. however China was the last significant market they could enter so growth has to slow, eventually it'll stop and Apple will start to contract. Doing dumb things like removing the headphone jack is only going to accelerate the process.
As a Skip who moved to Pommiland, mobile phones are not as much of a problem over here as they were back in Oz... Rarely am I stuck behind some stationary suckmuppet at a green turn arrow because they're too busy pissfarting around on their phone and wouldn't put it down until someone beeped at them. Back in Oz, that described every second light however I'd say the situation is definitely getting worse.
So I'd say this is about damn time. Here in the UK the Rozzers tend to enforce laws beyond speed. Do 10 over on a busy motorway and the plod couldn't care less, however tailgate, cut someone off or otherwise drive carelessly/dangerously and that'll illicit a response. DUI is an automatic suspension. Basically the cops are being pro-active here.
Regardless if it is theoretically feasible, the scenario is not practical in any way. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the scenario of hurling rocks at the earth was believable because the moon colony was 100% self-sustaining
The colony was not 100% self sustaining, they still needed high tech and exotic materials shipped from Earth. This was plot device Earth used to control the Moon. Sure the moon could grow it's own food, but when it came to the computers that ran everything, that needed to be lifted up from the surface.
Besides the entire premise of TMIAHM was terrible, why build a moonbase when the same kind of biodomes could be constructed on Earth (it doesn't necessarily need to be a dome as such, any sealed structure would suffice and even built underground if space was an issue) which would be cheaper to run.
Aircraft aren't like cars, you can't just hop from one to the next. There are certifications, training, simulators, supply chain, support infrastructure, etc. etc. It's why low-cost carriers are total monocultures in terms of aircraft they use. Ryanair *only* flies the 737NG. Easyjet *only* flies the A320 family.
This, running custom versions of aircraft are killing some airlines like QANTAS and BA who run custom 747's. They were developed in the days where a normal 747 couldn't make the flight from Sydney to LA. QF is phasing out the 747-400ER for normal A380's. Having large and varied fleets is expensive, having custom models is insane.
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If a home user (including light industrial like farms) can generate for less than the grid cost, why isn't the grid using Diesel and doing it cheaper?
This isn't about "Diesel", this is about the abuses of a privatized utility.
This. The fine article mentions Queensland. in the 00's Queensland privatised much of its electricity infrastructure and pretty much all of the retail. Since then the price of electricity has been pushed higher. I'd be surprised to find that the private electricity providers weren't trying to price rural users off the grid so they can bump up their profit.
I used to live in a mining town, it was cheaper for the company to run their own generators to supply the town as well as the site than to pay for scheme power.
in all fairness, these studios are trying to protect what's theirs.
It isn't actually "theirs".
Copyright is a legal contract between artists and the public to grant a limited monopoly over distribution in exchange for releasing their works into the public domain after the copyright duration.
Now you'll notice that it says "artist", not "content owner" and that it also says "limited". Copyright was originally limited to 20 years. However no significant amount of content has entered the public domain since the 1940's. In fact they keep extending copyright in order to prevent any work from being entered into the public domain.
So it seems the "content owners" are not keeping their end of the bargain... so why should we keep ours?
They are trying to restrict competition, so piracy became their competition.
Also I've spoken to several artists about this, their responses have always been the same. They dont care that I pirated their albums, in fact it helps them. What they want me to do is keep coming to their shows because thats where they make their money.
While I'm as libretarian as the next guy, and love "stick it to the man movements",
So basically you're saying your retarded. And in all probability, a content cartel shill.
Living in southern England, daylight savings time is fucking brilliant.
In June we're in DST, BST or British Summer Time (UTC +1), the sun comes up at 04:45-05:00 and sets at 21:30. This means we have daylight from 04:15 until 22:30 in the peak of summer. It sucks enough when its 5:00 and broad daylight, I'd hate for the sun to be coming up at half past 3 in the mornings. Daylight Savings also means that if you finish work at 5 PM, there's still enough time to do a lot of summer activities. Hell you can even go to the beach at 7PM if you wanted.
I used to live in Western Australia, they were backwards when it came to DST. Days were a bit shorter but in summer, the sun would be up at 05:30 so it would start getting light from 04:30. It would start getting dark around 19:30 and be twilight by 20:00. Given how much Perthites go on and on about beaches and outdoor activities (it's not like there is really anything else Perth has going for it) you'd think that they'd be a prime candidate for DST to get an extra hour of outdoors activities each day.
Hell no, the backwards people of Perth rejected DST because, and these are genuine excuses, the curtains might fade and the cows wont know what time to get milked. Glad I moved out of that nightmare.
As Uber continues to brush its teeth, Google scrambles to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I'm not sure a judge can order Uber to selectively forget the stolen designs. Is the idea a permanent block on Uber running self-driving cars? TFA's unclear.
Actually courts can do quite a lot.
They can prohibit Uber from using self driving technology all together.
If the batteries will be made in Nevada, and shipped to Australia, I'm curious to know how they plan to transport them. It seems to me the most logical way would be by boat but could they get there quickly enough? If these are lithium ion batteries would it be possible to ship them by air given all the shipping restrictions that are placed on lithium ion batteries currently? If they go by boat how would they be packed to minimize the chance of a catastrophe en route?
I take it Elon Musk has never been to Australia, especially South Australia.
Around Australia there exists a rift in space and time that not only ensures there is a minimum 6 month wait time before something reaches Australia, but it also makes it cost twice as much. I call this the Oceanic Price Dilation Field (OPDF).
Besides, then the South Australian government will just go down to Bunnings and get it for 10% less.
Driver in a cab company is an employee of a public business. Public businesses do NOT have unlimited right of association - and are required to serve all members of hte public the same. It's called the Civil Rights Act.
Companies are not people and do not have, nor should they have, the same freedoms as individuals.
Whilst I agree with the second sentence.
Taxi's are under no obligation to pick up anyone and everyone. They can refuse to pick up drunk people for example, this is discrimination but not illegal discrimination. What they cannot do is discriminate on protected attributes like race, religion, social class, tax bracket, so on and so forth. A taxi cannot refuse to pick up someone because they're black, have ginger hair, is catholic or wants to go somewhere that is predominately occupied by blacks or gingers.
This is one of the more vital reasons we license taxi drivers. When they've proven to be discriminatory in an illegal fashion (including when they've said "no you're drunk" when what they really meant was "no, you're black") they can have their licenses revoked and livelihoods ruined. Whilst in the UK where I live this kind of racism was gone centuries ago, the US still has issues with it.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
Sure that's funny and all, but how do I find the site for "Impossibly proportioned girls that want to date your testicles!"? I've been searching for that my whole life!
This.
And to add to this that a lot of content that is available on US Netflix is not available outside the US, even on Netflix. So if publishers are going to try to lock down their content, they can expect pirates.
I believe Gabe Newel, Brad Wardell (Of Stardock) as well as whoever is in charge of CD Projekt Red (GOG) have all said something along the lines of "pirates are just unserved customers".
In order for me to pay for some shows in the UK I need to wait for them to come out on DVD... that misses a huge window of opportunity for the vendor as I'm not going to wait six months for that to happen when I can just download them for free. Sure I feel a little bad for it... but then I think, fuck it, I tried to give them my money and they didn't want it. Hell, some shows dont even make it here on DVD.
If I told young people how much sex we had in the seventies, they wouldn't even believe it. The eighties were pretty good, too, and I understand the sixties were, as well. We are living in very conservative times, yet many seem not to realize it.
I think this is the root cause of it. Conservatives, especially religious conservatives are very anti-sex. Sex means people enjoying themselves, forgetting about the fabricated horrors that conservatives need to generate in order to stay in power. They try to paint sex as a shameful act as sex is a powerful enough drive that it erodes their hold over people.
I think a large part of the shaming culture has come from conservative sources, hell, their entire election campaign was based on trying to shame the opposition. I'm not just talking about Trump here, Cameron (UK) and Turnbull (Aus) did the same things in their election campaigns with the aid of Murdoch's media empire.
Japan is point in case for conservatism killing sex. The conservatives has pushed young people to the point where they no longer have the time or money to pursue complicated courting rituals. Now that is paying dividends in an aging nation.
If we want to have more sex (and better sex) we need to be more liberal. The sexual liberation of the late 60's was directly responsible for the sex in the seventies.
I use Apple Maps for navigation (it usually works better than Google Maps nav for me).
I use Google Maps because when I set the nav for Brighton, I dont want to end up in Northumberland.
I also dont care about traffic cameras and Google maps is the best I've seen for predicting traffic conditions and dealing with live traffic updates (which are quite good here in Southern England).
Evidence please? And not "it's been used 160,000 times".
A simple search in /. for "chatbot parking" turned up this previous article, which indicated that it successfully challenged 160,000 out of 250,000 tickets. So, no, not "it's been used 160,000 times". This is a "it's won 160,000 times". And that was as of June of last year. This NPR piece from earlier this year indicates that its up to 200,000 successful cases now in just three cities, and that its overall success rate with parking tickets stands at around 60%.
The question is, is 60% any better than any other methods. I'd say it's much lower than paying a lawyer at $400 an hour (I know a traffic lawyer who boasts a 90% sucess rate, thats where I got the $400 p/h figure from, I believe him because he doesn't take cases he's certain are going to lose). Here in the UK, the rule of thumb is, if it's issued by a local government, you need a bulletproof excuse to get out of it. If it's issued by a private corporation, just chuck it in the bin (so you don't get a fine for littering).
To issue fines, you need to either take it to court or have a remit from the government to do so. Pretty much the only organisations that I know of who have the power to do that without the local government doing the enforcing are universities (which have to have government issued charters to operate to begin with).
Rap is fucking garbage. People talk over a 8 second music loop and win Best Artist because they look good and dance around. There's no music being created anymore, it's all a sad performance for poor black people.
Apart from the poor bit (Rappers seem to have too much money) I agree completely.
However they're nowhere near as bad as electronic/dubstep. These are people who randomly throw together sounds like a 3 year old banging on pots and pans... No, wait, that is an insult to 3 year olds.
I'm certain I could write a script that could perform the same function. In fact, as soon as Japan solves the uncanny valley problem, all of the music chart will be virutal.
There's little wonder the newest song to be found in my car was from 2006. I miss the days where people could play an instrument and sang with their real voices. Of course the loudness war has a lot to answer for too.
I take instructions Waz gives me with a grain of salt these days, because something tricky it's telling you to do might give you an extra MINUTE vs. just stating on the highway... also Wze traffic understanding is inherently a little delayed.
I used Waze once because they had the Clarkson, Hammond and May voice set... which really just turned out to be mostly May. I've gone back to using Google Maps for navigation because Google Maps tells you which lanes to choose where as Waze doesn't.
"...because residential streets are designed for access, not throughput. And if they get misused, then that's bad."
BS. All roads are designed for "throughput", some for higher throughput that others. No road, however, is optimized for throughput since it's speed limit is set intentionally too low, at least in the US. Driving on a public road to get somewhere is NEVER misuse.
Here you lose all credibility in the argument. There is a hierarchy of roads. Local roads are for people to live on, these feed into collector roads, which feed to arterial routes which feed to freeways and highways. The more throughput you want, the more limited the access to the roadway and vice versa, the more people live on a road the lower throughput you want. Local roads really are just for starting and ending journeys.
Any properly designed city will be made so that people don't live on major thoroughfares. Of course given rather old cities like London, this isn't always possible. Anything in the US (which wasn't even a country when roads were invented) has no excuse except piss poor city planning.
I've used a craigslist plumber, as well as other craigslist services. Did the job, no leaks years later. Paid cash, was happy.
If this has a rating system, it is far better than craigslist.
If (and only if) the mechanic gets to set their own rates. Otherwise it's just as shady as Uber.
We're talking about H1B's here. Imported labour. If their jobs could be offshored, they already would've been: the offshoring job-market favours capital even more than that for indentured brown people.
Its not quite that simple. There are costs to offshoring and not all of them are monetary. Customers dont like the delays you get with offshoring. Having an indentured brown person in strangling range is better than having one in some god-forsaken shithole. Not to mention the cost of hiring westerners to be ex-pat managers. A middle management flunkie that might get $40,000 if they're lucky will easily get an ex-pat package that costs 3-4 times as much.
So making it harder to bring over indentured brown people will easily offshore projects and services that might have stayed onshore.
That being said, I'm sure there are loopholes a plenty for this. Remember that the outsourcing industry didn't kick up a stink about Trump's decrees... because those had obvious loopholes that can be exploited. What they kicked up a stink over was the fact some upstart (with a D against their name) wanted to raise the minimum H1-B salary to US$130,000.
Computers were first built back in the 40's... we didn't get them into the home until the 70's.
The first transistor-based computers were in the early 1950's so that's when the clock should start ticking since valve-based computers were clearly never going to be a consumer item. The same may be true of the next generation of computer technology - the current tech for quantum computers is not really consumer friendly if that turns out to be the next generation technological platform.
Fair enough, it's 2:30 where I live and I didn't feel like reading the Wikipedia article on computers to get exact dates. However that's still 20 years from prototype to home product so I stand by my point.
I forget where I read it, (back in high school, which is a while ago for some of us) but it takes 25 years from the point where a new technology becomes available for it to integrate into our lives. Replacements for silicon are largely still theoretical.
UK is the same. We speak English and the universal language of shouting.
This. You can easily spot an Englishman overseas because he's the one who steadfastly believes that any language barrier can be broken simply by shouting loudly in English.
We do. That's why so many are in India.
Where they were taught the Queens English (yay colonialism).
I have the feeling price may be a factor here.
Not really, Apple offers good discounts to schools, they sometimes were cheaper than any other competitor. They really took Georing to heart when he said "Give me your children when they are 5 and I will have them for life" (quote from memory, so may be slightly wrong).
The problem is schools are now given funding based on performance in most western countries. Private schools depend on their graduates getting into good universities and universities depend on students getting good jobs to surivive.
This is important because as an employer, it's been a risk to employ anyone under 25 for any role involving a computer. The problem is, as I figure it, is that using a computer is taught by rote memorisation (to save, click this icon) and given that Apple does everything differently and the corporate world uses Windows this meant that people leaving high school and university were woefully uneducated when it came to using basic corporate tools like Word and Outlook. At one point, I was asking people if they used Windows or Mac at home and putting Mac users at the bottom of the pile (strangely enough, it was only the windows users who asked why this was important, the Mac users just blurted out their preference).
So it's less about cost and more about getting students prepared for a life of wage slavery. If students aren't getting good jobs, schools have failed because now they're measured on it.
Physics
Yes and no.
Yes as in there is a limit to what we can do with silicon and transistors, but also no because of the way innovation tapers off after a few decades. Its the same reason that we dont see huge leaps in car, aeroplane and oven technology. Its because the design has matured to a point where for the most part we're just adding minor improvements to tried and tested designs. Intel/AMD/NVIDIA have pretty much reached this point and it will take a disruptive technology to change that.
Said disruption will likely be non-silicon or transistor based computers. However it will take 10-25 years for it to go from working prototype to household device. Computers were first built back in the 40's... we didn't get them into the home until the 70's. Even then the diffusion of innovation meant it was another 20 years before they were commonplace. We're up to the 90's if you're not keeping score. 27 years later, there isn't really anything that can be done to radically change existing designs, the last big innovation was changing to 64-bit and that was done in the early 00's. Much like with cars, all they are doing now is making minor changes, however over the course of a decade, these minor changes tend to make a big difference.
Also, this is why I didn't care about getting Skylake over Kaby Lake or a Geforce 10 over a Geforce 9 when I built my new gaming rig mid last year. I knew the difference would be minor (and it's easy to upgrade a GPU in 2 or 3 generations when a difference can be noticed).
I do, and I remember all the freakouts over the lack of SCSI and ADB ports, and on the Windows side of the aisle everyone insisting manufacturers NOT kill the PS/2 ports. Ultimately, the technology advances, and old ports aren't needed any more. You may very well find phones with headphone jacks for many years to come. But more and more, the industry will shift to wireless headphones, and those jacks will get less and less use. Kind of like those PS/2 ports that still ship on a few models of motherboards....
Actually, PS/2 still ships on a lot of mainboards. Only the cheapest of the cheap got rid of them, a £300 gaming motherboard will still have them.
Same with RS232 and LPT1 ports, although they have just been pins on the motherboard for a while now. Almost all KB's have been shipping as USB for over a decade now (probably closer to 15 years) and the port is still in use. The fact is, they're so cheap there's no point in getting rid of them when a tiny fraction of your market could still be using them.
However when it comes to headphone jacks, the overwhelming majority of people will still continue to use them. Wireless headphones have been on the market for years and have floundered because they all have some fundamental problems you cant get rid of, chief amongst them is the fact you have to charge the headphones, second to that is the fact Bluetooth is terrible for audio. Sorry fanboy, the headphone jack will be around for years to come.
You really think that the headphone jack is the culprit in Apple's market loss?
Sole culprit... No, but it does need to shoulder a large amount of the blame.
Apple has been steadily losing ground in it's established markets for years, they've offset this by entering new markets. however China was the last significant market they could enter so growth has to slow, eventually it'll stop and Apple will start to contract. Doing dumb things like removing the headphone jack is only going to accelerate the process.
There are similar laws currently in Australia:
https://www.vicroads.vic.gov.a...
As a Skip who moved to Pommiland, mobile phones are not as much of a problem over here as they were back in Oz... Rarely am I stuck behind some stationary suckmuppet at a green turn arrow because they're too busy pissfarting around on their phone and wouldn't put it down until someone beeped at them. Back in Oz, that described every second light however I'd say the situation is definitely getting worse.
So I'd say this is about damn time. Here in the UK the Rozzers tend to enforce laws beyond speed. Do 10 over on a busy motorway and the plod couldn't care less, however tailgate, cut someone off or otherwise drive carelessly/dangerously and that'll illicit a response. DUI is an automatic suspension. Basically the cops are being pro-active here.
Regardless if it is theoretically feasible, the scenario is not practical in any way. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the scenario of hurling rocks at the earth was believable because the moon colony was 100% self-sustaining
The colony was not 100% self sustaining, they still needed high tech and exotic materials shipped from Earth. This was plot device Earth used to control the Moon. Sure the moon could grow it's own food, but when it came to the computers that ran everything, that needed to be lifted up from the surface.
Besides the entire premise of TMIAHM was terrible, why build a moonbase when the same kind of biodomes could be constructed on Earth (it doesn't necessarily need to be a dome as such, any sealed structure would suffice and even built underground if space was an issue) which would be cheaper to run.
Aircraft aren't like cars, you can't just hop from one to the next. There are certifications, training, simulators, supply chain, support infrastructure, etc. etc. It's why low-cost carriers are total monocultures in terms of aircraft they use. Ryanair *only* flies the 737NG. Easyjet *only* flies the A320 family.
This, running custom versions of aircraft are killing some airlines like QANTAS and BA who run custom 747's. They were developed in the days where a normal 747 couldn't make the flight from Sydney to LA. QF is phasing out the 747-400ER for normal A380's. Having large and varied fleets is expensive, having custom models is insane.