And they keep your taxes in a gingerbread house in the woods and they eat little children. Fucking taxes...
I don't understand your response. The GP talked about lost revenue. I suggested the way in which revenue will, without a doubt, be made up. Governments exist by taxing human activity. Do you disagree that in the near future there will be special taxes on driverless cars?
America is criss-crossed by a lot of Interstate highways. If any state drags their feet too long, the trucks will be routed elsewhere, and that state will lose revenue and jobs.
What revenue and jobs? I thought that was kind of the point of driverless trucks?
Besides, with no need for humans in the cab, the fundamentals of trucks can be redesigned. No need for bunk space, windshield, driver seat, etc. Change the design of the cab to dramatically increase aerodynamics. Program convoys of 3–4 (so as not to be a nuisance) trucks to draft off of each other going down the highway to dramatically increase mileage. I'm betting driverless trucks can be a lot more fuel efficient than your average driver by method too, so gas tax revenue from trucking may not be as high.
But, the real answer to your question is what governments do with ANYTHING new--tax it.
A multispectral data processing program I wrote back in my college days: Part of launching it was giving it the date the data was collected. This was sanity checked against the system clock. Dates like before the construction of the scanners we usually used had a reasonable error message, asking if you were sure and giving a chance to reenter.
The message for a data collection date later than the data processing date was: "WONKITY! [name of institute] processes TOMORROW'S data TODAY!"
This was a reference to an incident in a humorous science fiction novel: _Bill the Galactic Hero_. The protagonists are sneaking around and are discovered by a cleaning robot and challenged as security breaching interlopers. One of them "bashes the robot on the braincase with a spanner", causing it to say "WONKITY!" and stagger away, rather than reporting them to security.
= = = =
When I was working on a typesetting system for newspaper publication, I heroically refrained from having it very occasionally insert "fnord" into the text. (See _The Illuminatus Trilogy_ for the joke, which is FAR to complex to explain here.)
Yes, PLEASE.
Or you could look at it as your employees doing [long list]
Tell management it's a "watermark" to detect copied code. (It's obviously not an open-source project. B-) )
Seriously: Suppressing easter-egg hiding means the best programmers are likely to look for a happier shop and move on, leaving the anal manager with the cream skimmed off his pool of talent.
On the other hand, a professional programmer will not spend substantial time on such things.
(An easy way to do it without substantial cost is to build it initially as part of a scaffold or a test suite component - with the easter-eggyness being a way to make it obviously a side issue and not corrupt the mission-critical output. Then the incremental labor cost of building it in as an easter egg is small - or may even be negative, by not taking it OUT of the version to be shipped as the product. B-) )
If you want to beat a Democrat in California, you need a fiscal conservative who is socially somewhat liberal.
Sounds like the Liberty Wing, Libertarians, and the Tea Party.
Solar generation can be had, for reasonably sunny sites, for abut $/kW, which puts it ahead of grid. Wind, since the advent of neodymium permanent-magnet alternators in kWish sizes, is also becoming competitive (and a solar/wind combo tends to balance nicely against available load. Alternators are electronics and the Moore's Law improvements are also bringing them down (though the economy of scale isn't there, yet.)
The big missing piece has been a high-capacity, long-lived, low-toxicity energy storage system, to cover calm nights and other weather variations. (Thee days of storage, in halfway-decent renewable energy sites, means you only have to run the backup generator a couple times a year - which you have to do, anyhow, to keep it from rotting internally.)
So these battery improvements should be enabling for off-grid housing, as well.
Won't kill the grid, though. Because all these electric cars will need charging - at several times the consumption of a house. Even in the good sites, adding an electric car to the load bumps the generation's capital cost up again, big time. Win some, lose some.
Tell the people who lead the California Republican Party to pick candidates who are closer to the center.
They did. They still do. That's most of why they keep losing.
If they pick a "centerist" (alias "democrat lite") why would anybody on the right bother to vote?
From the second the GW Bush made his crazy ill-advised "Axis of Evil" speech and then proceeded to invade one of those Axis members, it was pretty much guaranteed that Iran and North Korea would pursue nukes (and NK has already succeeded). They're not stupid. They know nukes are the only way to assure you won't be invaded or overthrown by the U.S.
North Korea has had a nuclear weapons program for decades. Literally, decades. North Korea joined, and then withdrew from, the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1993, followed by years of haggling, back and forths, industrial espionage (with Pakistan amongst others), and broken agreements. It's very disingenuous to claim that North Korea wanted and got nuclear weapons because of Bush.
Likewise, Iran has had a nuclear program for decades. US obsession with Iranian nukes goes back decades. See, e.g., Operation Merlin. Again, very disingenuous--or at the very least misinformed--to attempt to blame Bush.
You sound a little conflicted. If you don't like them then don't do business with them. Nobody will be offended I promise.
I'm very conflicted. As a consumer Amazon is pretty much everything I can ask for. The backend? Not so much.
Amazon has an app that does that
Companies - at least in the US - try to keep their engineers from looking at other patents, because knowing you're infringing triples the damage awards.
I hate the keyboard and trackpad on this Toshiba Satellite S75. (It's just as bad as the ones on the Lenovo Z710, too.) Overly-wide, ultra-thin, chicklets, with no clearance for fingernails. Brush the trackpad while typing and half a sentence is highlighted and instantly overwritten by the next keystroke, making it disappear. Typos up the wazoo. In nearly a year I haven't been able to get used to these designs.
The vast majority of patent trolls are typically very small entities that like to sue BIG companies for one obvious reason: Big companies have deep pockets.
It's not just patent trolls.
When a big technology company is in trouble, one thing they may do to try to stay alive is go through their portfolio of patents and sue everybody doing anything related to them. This is in the hope that they can pull in enough cash to stay alive a few more months, by finding actual infringement on discovery, or just provoking a patent cross-licensing-and-balancing-cash deal to make the suit go away.
About a decade ago I was on the receiving end of such a suit: My project had done some chips that included some new SONET functionality. Nortel was getting desparate and went after everybody doing SONET, so my project (and a few others) were related. I got called in to advise the lawyers on how what we did was different from the claims. (It was - drastically.) I hear that one ended up in a "swap and we pay some cash" settlement.
This was the only time I recall actually being asked to look at another company's patent on what we were doing. Companies - at least in the US - try to keep their engineers from looking at other patents, because knowing you're infringing triple. So we get to reinvent various wheels rather than raise the risk. That means one of the claimed advantages of patents - releasing recipies for the neat technology to general use after the patents expire - is about as bogus as the ever-extended copyrights.
I thought it was great overall, but it did seem to jump the shark a little on the concept travel.....
I don't like Amazon as a company. I don't like the way they deal with vendors. I really don't like the way they deal with their own employees, down to the recent non-complete agreements for warehouse laborers! As a consumer, I love Amazon, though I do try to not support them.
Why do I want this button?
We keep paper towels and toilet paper in the garage. When we're getting down to one (or no!) rolls left, either I or my wife will say "Oh, we only have one more roll of paper tolls left--let's make sure to get more next time we go to the store." Of course, sometimes that doesn't happen. Sometimes we forget to add paper towels to the list. Sometimes our beloved family cat will decide to spray rancid piss down the hallway, and we exceed our EPTU (estimated paper towel usage). If we had a button in the garage next to our paper towels, and every time we were getting remotely low we just tapped a button and didn't think about it again...that's brilliant.
I would normally never buy this kind of product from Amazon as the local store prices are _always_ better (especially if you keep an eye out for coupons, sales, etc--but even without that). The button might change my mind.
This is seriously one of those ideas that's so simple and yet so brilliant at the same time.
No man is an island if he's on at least one mailing list.
