I don't know if you've realized this, but the universe is an insane place. Time dilation, quantum entanglement, particle/wave duality, cosmic inflation, the very existence of all these forces and more are all incredibly wacky-sounding theories until we find out they seem to be real. I mean, what the fuck is gravity and *why* is it there? What is time?
I mean, have you seen how large the observable universe is? How the FUCK did all that shit get there? It's wacky. I'd be more concerned at this point if the theories weren't wacky. I've been on a physics and cosmology lecture kick on youtube, and at this point it would seem weirder if multiverse theory were wrong. Otherwise, why the hell is our universe the one that happened?
"As long as an industry is growing - there will be money to invest in lowering costs."
Once everyone is drinking milk, there isn't much room to dump money into lowering costs, because the profit gets squeeze out of the industry from competition. Many things do hit a floor and level out in price. But there is no reason to believe solar is anywhere near that floor. The raw material - silicon - is one of the cheapest and most abundant materials on the planet. Those lower cost rules don't go on forever for all products, but they are valid for periods of development in a product's life cycle. And I believe solar power will be one of the most important products of this century, so there is lots of room for growth. Humans cannot afford to keep hurting the Earth to get our energy, and solar presents a clear opportunity to harvest thousands of times more energy than we currently use. The technology is already on par with the cost of fossil fuels and we will continue to find ways to make it cheaper and more efficient.
Also, Milk is cheaper. You just can't tell because our dollars aren't worth the same amount. According to a short search, in 1950 a gallon of milk was $0.80, which is $7.88 in today's money. Milk is cheaper because we have enormous milk factories now, not little farms that have to support a bunch of workers.
And OF COURSE you can't reduce the cost of something below the cost of raw materials, but as I said in my previous post you CAN reduce the cost of raw materials by investing in better mining equipment.
I'm gonna have to throw this one back at you buddy... You don't know what you're talking about. Military spending is about half of social welfare spending (a good rule of thumb for our budgets is about 1/3 Military, 1/3 Medicare/Medicaid, and 1/3 Social Security). That has been true for a while now. See this graphic for actual data: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/defa...
But the thing is, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are all programs where Americans pay into a program and then get that money back at a later date either as direct cash or as medical care. Military spending, on the other hand, is money that goes nowhere. Sure, we employ Americans, but if your plan to promote jobs is to just give everyone a government job then we might as well be socialist. Hundreds of millions of dollars of military spending goes to bombs we literally vaporize. A shitload of money in the last decade went to building those big ass MRAP trucks that cost $1m apiece that we ended up handing to local law enforcement around the country for free because the military never actually needed them. The US bought $485m in new jets from Italy for Afghanistan and then scrapped them for $32k because they didn't work. http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/f... US Military spending is RIFE with pork.
Do you know how large the military budget is? It is way too big. In 2010 the budget was $700 Billion a year. In 2000 it was only $300B a year, and we were still BY FAR the world's largest military. We've added $400 BILLION dollars to our YEARLY military budget in the last 14 years. And it wasn't Obama that committed to that military spending, it was Bush. The president who committed to massive wars without paying for them (actually decreasing taxes at the same time).
If Obama wanted to add $10B a year to helping Americans, you'd probably flip. But unchecked spending on the military is just fine by you?
The budget that is going through the House tonight has $490 Million for a fighter jet that doesn't work and the military does not want. Meanwhile, we are cutting $92 million from the food stamp program. http://bulletin.represent.us/5...
Military spending in this country is fucking insane man, you literally have no idea. I can tell by your invocation of Obamacare as somehow a significant force in our debt that in fact you have no idea what you are talking about. Obamacare doesn't move the needle. And don't just shout that you know otherwise. You've been lied to and you've eaten it up. Go find the factual data that says Obamacare increased our budget by even 1% of our military spending. It's okay, I'll wait.
If the $10k was for his daughter to go to a mid-level college, but he was also spending $180k on gambling, buying guns he'll never use, and paying for personal protection far beyond what he needed, I'd suggest he cut those latter expenses before cutting the $10k for his daughter.
These decisions are not made in a vacuum. You can't chide a spender for putting money into science but fail to address the huge waste in other areas. And don't say "well yeah we need to cut both". Pick the optimum place to start, and start there first. Don't cut science while we're still dumping money into war. If we fix war spending (which is not investing money back into Americans), then we can discuss how much we spend on science. And funny thing... "your friend" wouldn't be in debt at all if it weren't for that military spending (yeah, mixing metahphor...), and you'd find the could spend even more money on science. In fact, doubling his science budget would be no problem.
So a better question would be:
You friend makes $400k per year. He spends $180k on himself, $180k on his house, $180k on stuff he likes, and $10k on his kids (meaning he loses $150k due to overspending every year). He says he wants to spend more on his kids because it pays off in the long term. Do you tell him not to? Or do you tell him to go for it and chill out on the stuff he likes so he doesn't go deeper into debt.
Interestingly, my sig has been this way for ~4 years.
Haha, wow... What an incredibly narrow view of the world you have. These "laws" are absolutely not nonsense. It is a real, broadly documented effect that the cost to produce goods in a large industry continually declines as a manufacturer learns over and over all the places they can reduce costs. http://www.economist.com/node/...
A manufacturer may come up with a trick to increase yield one year, so that there is 10% less product that falls out of the line after manufacturing due to defects. They may build more factories closer to consumers to reduce delivery costs. They may buy bigger machines to spit out twice as much goods for the same amount of labor, cutting labor costs in half. Their suppliers could get better at making the machines, offering faster machines for the same price - cutting down on overhead costs per part. The mines who supply the silicon could get more customers and invest in better machinery too, similarly decreasing their costs (which they can pass on to the consumer of those materials). Researchers can find new materials (like carbon for solar) that are cheaper than traditional materials. They could double efficiency for the same amount of material, cutting costs in half again.
Companies continually improve their processes to maintain their edge in a competitive marketplace. There is always someone who will come in and undercut you, so you need to be able to continually improve your processes or you will die. The whole phenomenon of continually lower prices was identified in the 1960's, and has repeatedly been shown to be valid over long terms. Moore's law for semiconductors is one great example, and solar panels still have huge demand above what we currently need them for. These laws apply to all kinds of things though... I'm sure it applies to tires, paper, pencils, shoes, televisions, LEDs, batteries, windows, magnets, etc. As long as an industry is growing - there will be money to invest in lowering costs.
You do need a place to put solar panels, but every rooftop in the country has more than enough room to power the underlying building with solar using just today's 20% efficient solar cells. We need power at night, but Elon Musk thinks lithium batteries will work just fine, and we have enough lithium to increase our use 20% every single year for 30 years before we'd need to even look for more. Lithium is one of the most abundant materials on the planet and the batteries are easy to recycle. Musk has said he plans on selling 30% of the batteries from his new factory to solar home customers (and he already owns a solar panel factory and a solar installation and leasing company). A solar-driven world seems very, very plausible.
Plus, we literally cannot afford to keep burning fossil fuels. We have no choice but to go carbon neutral and nuclear is not the option. We get free power from the sun. It is absolutely silly not to take advantage of it. Those fossil fuels we love? They were originally plants that grew from the sun or animals that ate plants that grew from the sun. Everything on Earth exists because of the vast power of the sun.
Well, they're kind of in a losing position - raise rates to pay for losses, and people just move to renewables sooner.
It seems pretty clear that generating electricity from free sunlight is going to be cheaper than mining and transporting fossil fuels to a complex facility to burn them. Solar has it's own "moore's law" equivalent that says the price of the panels goes down by 50% every time we double installed capacity. We're currently only powering less than 1% of the world from solar, so there is a lot more room for doubling. You can find a study that goes either way, but supposedly solar is already at parity with coal power in certain regions, and fossil fuels only get more expensive, not less.
Regulated or not, if you're selling the horse and buggy and someone else is selling the automobile, your industry will die.
This is about raising awareness of the potential good things that can happen if the FAA gets their act together and allows commercial use of drones. The more good stuff we know about, the more likely they are to do something... theoretically.
Are the blades carbon fiber yet? I just visited the Boeing 787 manufacturing plant today and that thing has carbon fiber wings and a carbon fiber body. They had several display sections and it seemed really, really sturdy.
It's the kind of thing that is mostly expensive due to labor, which means volume and automation could do a lot to make it cheaper.
I believe Nissan has stated that those are sold at a loss. They are only available for leaf owners as a service basically to avoid scaring away new buyers and give value to secondary sales.
You also need a PC with keyboard and mouse for precise controls. That's something consoles don't offer. There is no way you can use console to shoot me as fast as I can shoot you with a mouse. As soon as I see you, you are dead.
I hate using a keyboard and mouse. Its the only thing that has prevented me from every really picking up PC gaming. I know people who get used to it claim better accuracy (and tests seem to back that up), but as someone else here mentioned, if everyone is on a controller, its still even. And I love the Xbox 360 controller. -Taylor
You have a negative one score, but there is nothing wrong with what you said. This summary is complete crap. Slashdot chose to publish it. So Slashdot is publishing crap. This happens often. It is then not unreasonable to say the site has stagnated. I sure am sick of all this bottom of the barrel content myself.
The submitted did not read the article, or was an idiot. The approver(s?) did not read the article or are idiots. Everyone involved in posts like this are doing a bad job or are an idiot. Why does slashdot keep doing this? I see extremely poorly written content all the time here. Its just dumb.
*ALSO*, most blogs nowadays read their own comments and post updates like "many people in the comments have pointed out...". I don't think I have ever seen this happen on Slashdot, or if I have, it does not happen often enough. You'll see times where 80% of the comments are rightfully pointing out that the story is BS, but it still does not get updated. Posting bad content and then not fixing it when it is clearly shown to be BS just shows that the people running the site do not care about the quality of the content, or at the least are very bad at showing it. You just see false stories hang out on the front page all day long. Its ridiculous.
Ok, that's one iOS example down, 177,499 to go to equal Android ( at 71% of the 250,000 current iPhone apps).
I retract my previous post. I didn't RTFA, and didn't realize the Summary was misleading.
Sorry, Androids, I apologize. I guess we're ALL in the license-violation-boat together...
Honestly I'm a little surprised it wasn't obvious. Why would android be any different than other software? The android fanboy in me immediately noticed that it was probably unnecessary to single out that one OS. The article is now dead, but from what you say it sounds like I had the right idea. -Taylor
This is real Nerd news, but there are sometimes I wonder why? Shouldn't we have higher priorities to spend money on? Space elevator, far space travel, populate Mars (coz frankly we are getting too crowded on earth)? But beer in space? Just what we need, some drunk space pilot docking to the space station. This is why I have no hope for the human race. Sure, I could lighten up, but I'm ready for the younger generation to get off my earth lawn!
Umm, isn't this the same tired argument people use *every* time someone does something other than cure cancer?
"OMG, why are you playing baseball, there's cancer to be cured!"
"Why are you playing guitar, there are starving people in Africa!'
"Why are you studying journalism, you should be studying engineering and solving the energy crisis!"
No matter what you are doing, there is always something more noble to be done, but we can't all be doing noble things. There's nothing wrong with brewing beer for consumption in space, or making Justin Bieber lunchboxes for kids or making yet another iPad case. People should do whatever they're best at, or whatever makes them happy. -Taylor
Whenever somebody says "it's our destiny" , I shiver. I'm conscious that any minute now they'll be waving a gun around and saying "God made me do it!" or "the voices in my head said it was my duty!".
Control your own future, my friend. Don't believe in destiny or any other crazy ideas that your future is mapped out and you have no free will. You don't have to base your life on the belief in Ancient Greek goddesses (though I suppose other people believe in other gods so who am I to say what your belief system should be based upon...)
Jesus christ man, chill the fuck out. I'm not some religious lunatic with a gun fetish. I'm not even religious. And I didn't mean its our destiny like "God has willed it unto us" or some shit. I just meant that it is the most likely outcome of the progression of human society. If I had to place a bet, I'd bet humans end up populating the solar system and beyond. I'm not here to debate the meaning of the word "destiny" as anything other than how things end up (regardless of how or why).
You've drunk your own kool-aid here, believing that you can simply assume people who suggest things you don't believe in are lunatics. But I'm not crazy. I mad a simple statement on where I believe we will end up, and you take me to be a gun waving lunatic. You can't look at everything like "You versus the crazies". There exist people with opinions that oppose yours who are in no way crazy. In fact, I suspect its a lot of people. -Taylor
It should be a crime to be as naive as you, falling for the common Star Trek "Final Frontier" misconception that exploring the impossibly vast, empty, radiation-bombarded, vacuum of cold space is in any way analogous to exploring different parts of the planet earth.
As naive as, say, Carl Sagan? Who made that exact comparison in Pale Blue Dot?
It has always been our destiny to cover this earth, and it is certainly also our destiny to explore the cosmos. Compared to the skills and resources of their time, crossing the vast Atlantic ocean really isn't much different than modern humans landing on Mars. I understand the immense difficulties in doing so, but there were immense difficulties in crossing the Atlantic back then. And there were many deaths, as there well may be when we begin to send humans far from Earth. Space is vast and inhospitable, but to a shipwrecked sailor, so is the ocean. They may live a little longer before the sea takes them, but if a storm sunk their ship, they had nearly as little chance of surviving as a human in a damaged Space Ship. There's nothing to drink, nowhere to take refuge, and generally nothing to eat.
Space now and the oceans of our past are not nearly as different as you may think.
Or it could also be interesting that your 10 Mb/s speed is available never. How would that go over?
Reminds me of when I call places like my ISP and other companies. I always get the message "We're experiencing an unusually high volume of calls at the moment, please bear with us."
Really, unusually high? Why does it *always* seem to be "unusually" high? I would love to set up some automated system to call these companies and see how often I get that message. I bet that even if you called every hour for weeks, you would always get that message. Seems to me that you can't call something unusual if its always the case.
As far as bandwidth - yeah, its normally a crock of shit. Though currently I've gotten a great connection. I think my plan is only 20 or 25 Mb/s but I usually get over 30 on speed tests. This is Comcast in Silicon Valley (Campbell). -Taylor
I'm not sure what the motivation to ask the question "are they too expensive" comes from, when tablets (in generalities) are one of the hottest selling segments of the computing market right now. Can you imagine how long a marketing guy at Apple would have a job if he stood up in a board meeting and suggested that the iPad was too expensive...all while they're selling them by the millions.
Now if the question were different, like "is tablet 'x' too expensive", then it might be an interesting conversation. I've seen several new tablets poised for sale at costs HIGHER than the ipad...which seems like a ridiculously short sighted move. You don't enter a market with a "me too" product priced higher than the established leader (unless you're Apple), unless you have something markedly better to offer. And frankly, "it's android" doesn't rise to that level.
Well, the Xoom has two cameras, a bunch more RAM, a dual core processor, will get a free upgrade to 4G "when its ready", and is only $70 more than the equivalent iPad. Plus Android Honeycomb looks like a solid OS, so that should be fine.
Where that reasoning falls apart though is that Apple isn't going to sell the same iPad forever. They have got to have a new one coming out soon, and they will certainly either keep pricing the same or lower it.
Also, as you stated, Motorola is not Apple, and no matter how good your product is, you cannot compete on features alone with Apple. Most people don't care if they get something "better" than an iPad or iPhone. If they have the money for the apple product, they'll be totally happy with it. They'll only look at something else if its cheaper. Then they might be very happy with the purchase if its good. But I just think regular people don't bother trying to absolutely maximize their purchase. They go for good enough, which apple tends to satisfy safely. (note that i don't expect you all to be these "regular" people i speak of)
So I guess I agree with you. I think their pricing is dumb as hell. But I also think it makes sense from a value perspective. Its just that the market isn't operating on a pure value perspective (or they put lots of value in the "Apple" name).
I agree. I was beginning to doubt that until a particular friend of mine went out and bought one. When it first came out he was excited by it, but he said that he was going to wait for the "killer ap" to come out for it. Six months later he went out and bought one. I asked him what the "killer ap" was and he said, "Well, it does this and it does that." All things that fell into one of three classes. Either his laptop or his Iphone already did them in ways that totally suited his needs or it was a functionality that was purely for play. He bought one because his sense of "cool" could not stand being without one any longer.
I dunno, for me the killer app has always been the browser. I just want something thin and light and easy that I can browse the web on. My laptop is a big fast beast for CAD, and is pretty heavy. It also rests in my workshop downstairs most of the time. I do a *lot* of browsing on my phone, so I wish I just had a "bigger phone" more or less. Tablets seem to fill that niche.
I haven't got an iPad though. I've been waiting for Android tablet as that is my OS of choice. Luckily between LG, Moto and Samsung (with Honeycomb looking awesome), I have some good options. I'm not happy about Motorola's pricing, but I might go for the wifi model (my Nexus One has wifi tethering builtin for free). They haven't said when the wifi model comes out though, sadly.
They're all expensive and I'd much rather have them be $200-300, but they still satisfy a need (or want, whatever) that I have, so I might put up the money when the right one comes along. -Taylor
Using wiping software designed for mechanical disks makes absolutely no sense and the results from this study are 100% predictable.
If people were never surprised by predictable things the entire news industry would take a nosedive and be reduced to a shadow of its current self. It'd fuck up the economy!
This just in: this morning a FLAMING BALL OF GAS OVER 1 MILLION TIMES THE SIZE OF THE EARTH APPEARED OVER THE HORIZON! IT IS ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN THAT IT WILL ENGULF THE EARTH IN FLAMES AND DESTROY THE ENTIRE PLANET.*
What would be nice is to have the ATA erase command standardized, so this can be easily done.
Command gets handed to the drive controller, controller does the erasing the right way, where on a hard drive, it zeroes out sectors, even the ones on the bad sector relocation table, and sectors marked as bad. On a SSD, it zeroes out everything regardless of the status with regards to wear leveling.
Even better would be having the drive controller encrypt all data, storing the key as a value in NVRAM. Then when it gets handed an erase command, it replaces the key stored with one randomly generated.
Even better would be to have the drive controller to have its own free space bitmap. After being zeroed, if a sector is read without being written to, the controller returns just zeroes, regardless of the actual data present. If the sector was written to, the controller marks it as used in the bitmap and then returns the sector's data on subsequent writes. This way, an erase command can be almost immediate (flagging everything in the bitmap as free), and outside of yanking the controller and looking at the platters/cells, there is no way to retrieve the data that was erased. Bonus points if the controller zeroed out data in the background.
Better still might be to build flash memory chips with a built-in fuse that cannot be reset. Wipe the data (just in case) and then have some command that physically blows the fuse on every actual flash memory chip onboard. Then someone would have to dissolve the chip and somehow repair the fuse just to get to the data, which would have been erased anyway.
That could make one hell of a virus though if expensive SSD's could be destroyed from software alone. Maybe have it be a (clearly labeled!) jumper on the drive that does the fuse blowing. -Taylor
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if you've realized this, but the universe is an insane place. Time dilation, quantum entanglement, particle/wave duality, cosmic inflation, the very existence of all these forces and more are all incredibly wacky-sounding theories until we find out they seem to be real. I mean, what the fuck is gravity and *why* is it there? What is time?
I mean, have you seen how large the observable universe is? How the FUCK did all that shit get there? It's wacky. I'd be more concerned at this point if the theories weren't wacky. I've been on a physics and cosmology lecture kick on youtube, and at this point it would seem weirder if multiverse theory were wrong. Otherwise, why the hell is our universe the one that happened?
I said pretty clearly:
"As long as an industry is growing - there will be money to invest in lowering costs."
Once everyone is drinking milk, there isn't much room to dump money into lowering costs, because the profit gets squeeze out of the industry from competition. Many things do hit a floor and level out in price. But there is no reason to believe solar is anywhere near that floor. The raw material - silicon - is one of the cheapest and most abundant materials on the planet. Those lower cost rules don't go on forever for all products, but they are valid for periods of development in a product's life cycle. And I believe solar power will be one of the most important products of this century, so there is lots of room for growth. Humans cannot afford to keep hurting the Earth to get our energy, and solar presents a clear opportunity to harvest thousands of times more energy than we currently use. The technology is already on par with the cost of fossil fuels and we will continue to find ways to make it cheaper and more efficient.
Also, Milk is cheaper. You just can't tell because our dollars aren't worth the same amount. According to a short search, in 1950 a gallon of milk was $0.80, which is $7.88 in today's money. Milk is cheaper because we have enormous milk factories now, not little farms that have to support a bunch of workers.
And OF COURSE you can't reduce the cost of something below the cost of raw materials, but as I said in my previous post you CAN reduce the cost of raw materials by investing in better mining equipment.
I'm gonna have to throw this one back at you buddy... You don't know what you're talking about. Military spending is about half of social welfare spending (a good rule of thumb for our budgets is about 1/3 Military, 1/3 Medicare/Medicaid, and 1/3 Social Security). That has been true for a while now. See this graphic for actual data: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/defa...
But the thing is, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are all programs where Americans pay into a program and then get that money back at a later date either as direct cash or as medical care. Military spending, on the other hand, is money that goes nowhere. Sure, we employ Americans, but if your plan to promote jobs is to just give everyone a government job then we might as well be socialist. Hundreds of millions of dollars of military spending goes to bombs we literally vaporize. A shitload of money in the last decade went to building those big ass MRAP trucks that cost $1m apiece that we ended up handing to local law enforcement around the country for free because the military never actually needed them. The US bought $485m in new jets from Italy for Afghanistan and then scrapped them for $32k because they didn't work. http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/f...
US Military spending is RIFE with pork.
Do you know how large the military budget is? It is way too big. In 2010 the budget was $700 Billion a year. In 2000 it was only $300B a year, and we were still BY FAR the world's largest military. We've added $400 BILLION dollars to our YEARLY military budget in the last 14 years. And it wasn't Obama that committed to that military spending, it was Bush. The president who committed to massive wars without paying for them (actually decreasing taxes at the same time).
This is how our military spending stacks up to the rest of the world.
http://cdn1.globalissues.org/i...
If Obama wanted to add $10B a year to helping Americans, you'd probably flip. But unchecked spending on the military is just fine by you?
The budget that is going through the House tonight has $490 Million for a fighter jet that doesn't work and the military does not want. Meanwhile, we are cutting $92 million from the food stamp program.
http://bulletin.represent.us/5...
Military spending in this country is fucking insane man, you literally have no idea. I can tell by your invocation of Obamacare as somehow a significant force in our debt that in fact you have no idea what you are talking about. Obamacare doesn't move the needle. And don't just shout that you know otherwise. You've been lied to and you've eaten it up. Go find the factual data that says Obamacare increased our budget by even 1% of our military spending. It's okay, I'll wait.
If the $10k was for his daughter to go to a mid-level college, but he was also spending $180k on gambling, buying guns he'll never use, and paying for personal protection far beyond what he needed, I'd suggest he cut those latter expenses before cutting the $10k for his daughter.
These decisions are not made in a vacuum. You can't chide a spender for putting money into science but fail to address the huge waste in other areas. And don't say "well yeah we need to cut both". Pick the optimum place to start, and start there first. Don't cut science while we're still dumping money into war. If we fix war spending (which is not investing money back into Americans), then we can discuss how much we spend on science. And funny thing... "your friend" wouldn't be in debt at all if it weren't for that military spending (yeah, mixing metahphor...), and you'd find the could spend even more money on science. In fact, doubling his science budget would be no problem.
So a better question would be:
You friend makes $400k per year. He spends $180k on himself, $180k on his house, $180k on stuff he likes, and $10k on his kids (meaning he loses $150k due to overspending every year). He says he wants to spend more on his kids because it pays off in the long term. Do you tell him not to? Or do you tell him to go for it and chill out on the stuff he likes so he doesn't go deeper into debt.
Interestingly, my sig has been this way for ~4 years.
Haha, wow... What an incredibly narrow view of the world you have. These "laws" are absolutely not nonsense. It is a real, broadly documented effect that the cost to produce goods in a large industry continually declines as a manufacturer learns over and over all the places they can reduce costs. http://www.economist.com/node/...
A manufacturer may come up with a trick to increase yield one year, so that there is 10% less product that falls out of the line after manufacturing due to defects. They may build more factories closer to consumers to reduce delivery costs. They may buy bigger machines to spit out twice as much goods for the same amount of labor, cutting labor costs in half. Their suppliers could get better at making the machines, offering faster machines for the same price - cutting down on overhead costs per part. The mines who supply the silicon could get more customers and invest in better machinery too, similarly decreasing their costs (which they can pass on to the consumer of those materials). Researchers can find new materials (like carbon for solar) that are cheaper than traditional materials. They could double efficiency for the same amount of material, cutting costs in half again.
Companies continually improve their processes to maintain their edge in a competitive marketplace. There is always someone who will come in and undercut you, so you need to be able to continually improve your processes or you will die. The whole phenomenon of continually lower prices was identified in the 1960's, and has repeatedly been shown to be valid over long terms. Moore's law for semiconductors is one great example, and solar panels still have huge demand above what we currently need them for. These laws apply to all kinds of things though... I'm sure it applies to tires, paper, pencils, shoes, televisions, LEDs, batteries, windows, magnets, etc. As long as an industry is growing - there will be money to invest in lowering costs.
You do need a place to put solar panels, but every rooftop in the country has more than enough room to power the underlying building with solar using just today's 20% efficient solar cells. We need power at night, but Elon Musk thinks lithium batteries will work just fine, and we have enough lithium to increase our use 20% every single year for 30 years before we'd need to even look for more. Lithium is one of the most abundant materials on the planet and the batteries are easy to recycle. Musk has said he plans on selling 30% of the batteries from his new factory to solar home customers (and he already owns a solar panel factory and a solar installation and leasing company). A solar-driven world seems very, very plausible.
Plus, we literally cannot afford to keep burning fossil fuels. We have no choice but to go carbon neutral and nuclear is not the option. We get free power from the sun. It is absolutely silly not to take advantage of it. Those fossil fuels we love? They were originally plants that grew from the sun or animals that ate plants that grew from the sun. Everything on Earth exists because of the vast power of the sun.
Ah, my mistake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Costs do halve roughly every ten years at present rates.
Well, they're kind of in a losing position - raise rates to pay for losses, and people just move to renewables sooner.
It seems pretty clear that generating electricity from free sunlight is going to be cheaper than mining and transporting fossil fuels to a complex facility to burn them. Solar has it's own "moore's law" equivalent that says the price of the panels goes down by 50% every time we double installed capacity. We're currently only powering less than 1% of the world from solar, so there is a lot more room for doubling. You can find a study that goes either way, but supposedly solar is already at parity with coal power in certain regions, and fossil fuels only get more expensive, not less.
Regulated or not, if you're selling the horse and buggy and someone else is selling the automobile, your industry will die.
This is about raising awareness of the potential good things that can happen if the FAA gets their act together and allows commercial use of drones. The more good stuff we know about, the more likely they are to do something... theoretically.
Sure! Here is a source:
http://www.autoblog.com/2014/0...
Are the blades carbon fiber yet? I just visited the Boeing 787 manufacturing plant today and that thing has carbon fiber wings and a carbon fiber body. They had several display sections and it seemed really, really sturdy.
It's the kind of thing that is mostly expensive due to labor, which means volume and automation could do a lot to make it cheaper.
I believe Nissan has stated that those are sold at a loss. They are only available for leaf owners as a service basically to avoid scaring away new buyers and give value to secondary sales.
You also need a PC with keyboard and mouse for precise controls. That's something consoles don't offer. There is no way you can use console to shoot me as fast as I can shoot you with a mouse. As soon as I see you, you are dead.
I hate using a keyboard and mouse. Its the only thing that has prevented me from every really picking up PC gaming. I know people who get used to it claim better accuracy (and tests seem to back that up), but as someone else here mentioned, if everyone is on a controller, its still even. And I love the Xbox 360 controller.
-Taylor
Stop feeding the trolls.
But he's not a troll, he was spot on and still modded down. I was pointing that out.
Unless you meant Slashdot is the troll, in which case, we're all feeding it.
Or if are *you* the troll, and you're pulling a Matrix like "don't worry about the vase" trick on me, because you knew I'd feed you for saying that...
Oh god, you're the oracle! And worse, I'm Keanu Reeves!
You have a negative one score, but there is nothing wrong with what you said. This summary is complete crap. Slashdot chose to publish it. So Slashdot is publishing crap. This happens often. It is then not unreasonable to say the site has stagnated. I sure am sick of all this bottom of the barrel content myself.
The submitted did not read the article, or was an idiot. The approver(s?) did not read the article or are idiots. Everyone involved in posts like this are doing a bad job or are an idiot. Why does slashdot keep doing this? I see extremely poorly written content all the time here. Its just dumb.
*ALSO*, most blogs nowadays read their own comments and post updates like "many people in the comments have pointed out...". I don't think I have ever seen this happen on Slashdot, or if I have, it does not happen often enough. You'll see times where 80% of the comments are rightfully pointing out that the story is BS, but it still does not get updated. Posting bad content and then not fixing it when it is clearly shown to be BS just shows that the people running the site do not care about the quality of the content, or at the least are very bad at showing it. You just see false stories hang out on the front page all day long. Its ridiculous.
Shape up slashdot!
-Taylor
You flag the app, and Google will remove the apps from the android market. Why are Google to blame here?
iOS has violations too. http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPhone/The+Blocks+Cometh/news.asp?c=26696
Ok, that's one iOS example down, 177,499 to go to equal Android ( at 71% of the 250,000 current iPhone apps).
I retract my previous post. I didn't RTFA, and didn't realize the Summary was misleading.
Sorry, Androids, I apologize. I guess we're ALL in the license-violation-boat together...
Honestly I'm a little surprised it wasn't obvious. Why would android be any different than other software? The android fanboy in me immediately noticed that it was probably unnecessary to single out that one OS. The article is now dead, but from what you say it sounds like I had the right idea.
-Taylor
True. In the event of something happening that takes out both the Moon and the Earth, your data will be the least of your concerns.
Unless your data includes "How to build a new Earth." Then you'd want it!
This is real Nerd news, but there are sometimes I wonder why? Shouldn't we have higher priorities to spend money on? Space elevator, far space travel, populate Mars (coz frankly we are getting too crowded on earth)? But beer in space? Just what we need, some drunk space pilot docking to the space station. This is why I have no hope for the human race. Sure, I could lighten up, but I'm ready for the younger generation to get off my earth lawn!
Umm, isn't this the same tired argument people use *every* time someone does something other than cure cancer?
"OMG, why are you playing baseball, there's cancer to be cured!"
"Why are you playing guitar, there are starving people in Africa!'
"Why are you studying journalism, you should be studying engineering and solving the energy crisis!"
No matter what you are doing, there is always something more noble to be done, but we can't all be doing noble things. There's nothing wrong with brewing beer for consumption in space, or making Justin Bieber lunchboxes for kids or making yet another iPad case. People should do whatever they're best at, or whatever makes them happy.
-Taylor
I can't confirm that Google has released OTA updates for the Nexus One anywhere.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/01/nexus-one-android-2-3-3-update-arrives-ota-breaks-google-voice/
Confirmed.
Whenever somebody says "it's our destiny" , I shiver. I'm conscious that any minute now they'll be waving a gun around and saying "God made me do it!" or "the voices in my head said it was my duty!".
Control your own future, my friend. Don't believe in destiny or any other crazy ideas that your future is mapped out and you have no free will. You don't have to base your life on the belief in Ancient Greek goddesses (though I suppose other people believe in other gods so who am I to say what your belief system should be based upon...)
Jesus christ man, chill the fuck out. I'm not some religious lunatic with a gun fetish. I'm not even religious. And I didn't mean its our destiny like "God has willed it unto us" or some shit. I just meant that it is the most likely outcome of the progression of human society. If I had to place a bet, I'd bet humans end up populating the solar system and beyond. I'm not here to debate the meaning of the word "destiny" as anything other than how things end up (regardless of how or why).
You've drunk your own kool-aid here, believing that you can simply assume people who suggest things you don't believe in are lunatics. But I'm not crazy. I mad a simple statement on where I believe we will end up, and you take me to be a gun waving lunatic. You can't look at everything like "You versus the crazies". There exist people with opinions that oppose yours who are in no way crazy. In fact, I suspect its a lot of people.
-Taylor
It should be a crime to be as naive as you, falling for the common Star Trek "Final Frontier" misconception that exploring the impossibly vast, empty, radiation-bombarded, vacuum of cold space is in any way analogous to exploring different parts of the planet earth.
As naive as, say, Carl Sagan? Who made that exact comparison in Pale Blue Dot?
It has always been our destiny to cover this earth, and it is certainly also our destiny to explore the cosmos. Compared to the skills and resources of their time, crossing the vast Atlantic ocean really isn't much different than modern humans landing on Mars. I understand the immense difficulties in doing so, but there were immense difficulties in crossing the Atlantic back then. And there were many deaths, as there well may be when we begin to send humans far from Earth. Space is vast and inhospitable, but to a shipwrecked sailor, so is the ocean. They may live a little longer before the sea takes them, but if a storm sunk their ship, they had nearly as little chance of surviving as a human in a damaged Space Ship. There's nothing to drink, nowhere to take refuge, and generally nothing to eat.
Space now and the oceans of our past are not nearly as different as you may think.
-Taylor
Or it could also be interesting that your 10 Mb/s speed is available never. How would that go over?
Reminds me of when I call places like my ISP and other companies. I always get the message "We're experiencing an unusually high volume of calls at the moment, please bear with us."
Really, unusually high? Why does it *always* seem to be "unusually" high? I would love to set up some automated system to call these companies and see how often I get that message. I bet that even if you called every hour for weeks, you would always get that message. Seems to me that you can't call something unusual if its always the case.
As far as bandwidth - yeah, its normally a crock of shit. Though currently I've gotten a great connection. I think my plan is only 20 or 25 Mb/s but I usually get over 30 on speed tests. This is Comcast in Silicon Valley (Campbell).
-Taylor
I'm not sure what the motivation to ask the question "are they too expensive" comes from, when tablets (in generalities) are one of the hottest selling segments of the computing market right now. Can you imagine how long a marketing guy at Apple would have a job if he stood up in a board meeting and suggested that the iPad was too expensive...all while they're selling them by the millions.
Now if the question were different, like "is tablet 'x' too expensive", then it might be an interesting conversation. I've seen several new tablets poised for sale at costs HIGHER than the ipad...which seems like a ridiculously short sighted move. You don't enter a market with a "me too" product priced higher than the established leader (unless you're Apple), unless you have something markedly better to offer. And frankly, "it's android" doesn't rise to that level.
Well, the Xoom has two cameras, a bunch more RAM, a dual core processor, will get a free upgrade to 4G "when its ready", and is only $70 more than the equivalent iPad. Plus Android Honeycomb looks like a solid OS, so that should be fine.
Where that reasoning falls apart though is that Apple isn't going to sell the same iPad forever. They have got to have a new one coming out soon, and they will certainly either keep pricing the same or lower it.
Also, as you stated, Motorola is not Apple, and no matter how good your product is, you cannot compete on features alone with Apple. Most people don't care if they get something "better" than an iPad or iPhone. If they have the money for the apple product, they'll be totally happy with it. They'll only look at something else if its cheaper. Then they might be very happy with the purchase if its good. But I just think regular people don't bother trying to absolutely maximize their purchase. They go for good enough, which apple tends to satisfy safely. (note that i don't expect you all to be these "regular" people i speak of)
So I guess I agree with you. I think their pricing is dumb as hell. But I also think it makes sense from a value perspective. Its just that the market isn't operating on a pure value perspective (or they put lots of value in the "Apple" name).
-Taylor
I agree. I was beginning to doubt that until a particular friend of mine went out and bought one. When it first came out he was excited by it, but he said that he was going to wait for the "killer ap" to come out for it. Six months later he went out and bought one. I asked him what the "killer ap" was and he said, "Well, it does this and it does that." All things that fell into one of three classes. Either his laptop or his Iphone already did them in ways that totally suited his needs or it was a functionality that was purely for play. He bought one because his sense of "cool" could not stand being without one any longer.
I dunno, for me the killer app has always been the browser. I just want something thin and light and easy that I can browse the web on. My laptop is a big fast beast for CAD, and is pretty heavy. It also rests in my workshop downstairs most of the time. I do a *lot* of browsing on my phone, so I wish I just had a "bigger phone" more or less. Tablets seem to fill that niche.
I haven't got an iPad though. I've been waiting for Android tablet as that is my OS of choice. Luckily between LG, Moto and Samsung (with Honeycomb looking awesome), I have some good options. I'm not happy about Motorola's pricing, but I might go for the wifi model (my Nexus One has wifi tethering builtin for free). They haven't said when the wifi model comes out though, sadly.
They're all expensive and I'd much rather have them be $200-300, but they still satisfy a need (or want, whatever) that I have, so I might put up the money when the right one comes along.
-Taylor
If people were never surprised by predictable things the entire news industry would take a nosedive and be reduced to a shadow of its current self. It'd fuck up the economy!
This just in: this morning a FLAMING BALL OF GAS OVER 1 MILLION TIMES THE SIZE OF THE EARTH APPEARED OVER THE HORIZON! IT IS ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN THAT IT WILL ENGULF THE EARTH IN FLAMES AND DESTROY THE ENTIRE PLANET.*
*this is technically true.
What would be nice is to have the ATA erase command standardized, so this can be easily done.
Command gets handed to the drive controller, controller does the erasing the right way, where on a hard drive, it zeroes out sectors, even the ones on the bad sector relocation table, and sectors marked as bad. On a SSD, it zeroes out everything regardless of the status with regards to wear leveling.
Even better would be having the drive controller encrypt all data, storing the key as a value in NVRAM. Then when it gets handed an erase command, it replaces the key stored with one randomly generated.
Even better would be to have the drive controller to have its own free space bitmap. After being zeroed, if a sector is read without being written to, the controller returns just zeroes, regardless of the actual data present. If the sector was written to, the controller marks it as used in the bitmap and then returns the sector's data on subsequent writes. This way, an erase command can be almost immediate (flagging everything in the bitmap as free), and outside of yanking the controller and looking at the platters/cells, there is no way to retrieve the data that was erased. Bonus points if the controller zeroed out data in the background.
Better still might be to build flash memory chips with a built-in fuse that cannot be reset. Wipe the data (just in case) and then have some command that physically blows the fuse on every actual flash memory chip onboard. Then someone would have to dissolve the chip and somehow repair the fuse just to get to the data, which would have been erased anyway.
That could make one hell of a virus though if expensive SSD's could be destroyed from software alone. Maybe have it be a (clearly labeled!) jumper on the drive that does the fuse blowing.
-Taylor