The closest analogy I can think of is Xerox. For a time during the 1980s, people would tell you "xerox it" instead of photocopy it. In both Xerox's and Google's cases, the company's name was being used as a generic verb for something their product did, but not as a generic description for a similar product by another company. And in both cases, the companies retained their trademark.

While there's been much ballyhoo made about the error which caused the demise of Mars Climate Orbiter, at its root it wasn't an english-metric foulup. The real cause was that somebody didn't write down the units on a number, and somebody else assumed what the units were without verifying. If the original number had been written in kilonewton-seconds and been entered as newton-seconds, the end result would have been just as disastrous even though everything was in metric.

The first thing that was driven into me over and over my freshman year as an engineering student was to always write down the units. If you did all the math right on a homework problem and forgot to write down the units, it was marked wrong. Because it is wrong. Without units, the number is a dimensionless number (which have their own uses), and not the expected answer.

Back in the 1920s-1940s as cars became more popular, more people started dying in car crashes. In response, the auto manufacturers did the obvious thing and started making the cars stronger and stronger. And people kept dying.

It wasn't until the 1950s when the first controlled crash tests were done, that they discovered that the stronger car bodies were the worst possible thing you could do. They did nothing to reduce the kinetic energy of the occupants before impact. The car would hit, the strong body would stop moving almost instantly, and the occupants would keep flying forward at full speed until they hit the front of the car. This is what led to the crumple zones we have today - where the car body deliberately flexes and deforms to absorb crash energy, lessening the impact forces on the occupants.

I think phones are going to go the same way. Rather than build the bodies and faces stronger and stronger to try to make them survive drops, they're going to be replaced with flexible screens once those come down in price and become commonplace. Bend and flex to absorb the impact energy, not try to stiffly resist it until something shatters. Scratches can be handled by a disposable plastic protector (I go through about one a year, so it's not at all inconvenient).

Sure, Apple is all about marketing, and they loved to give that "2nd hardest material after diamond" pitch when introducing their watch

Actually it's not. Moissanite (silicon carbide) is harder. 9.5 on the Mohs scale, vs 9 for sapphire/corundum, 10 for diamond. Its structure is the same as diamond, except it alternates between silicon and carbon atoms, the silicon-carbon bond being nearly as strong as a carbon-carbon bond. I first ran across it (as an opaque conglomerate of smaller crystals) as guides for fishing rods - the hardness prevents braided lines from gouging a groove in the guide. There are a bunch of other materials harder than corundum, but I believe moissanite is the only transparent one.

Remember what your momma taught you - never trust a salesman.

I know Hollywood has brainwashed everyone into thinking it's illegal to distribute any kind of video or music online. But Frontline and PBS are publicly funded It's ok to watch it online.

Frequency comes in the fact that the driver makes one trip while Uber drivers make several. The more the driver is on the road the bigger chance of an accident.

There's no difference in frequency. If the Uber driver were not there, the person needing a ride would just get it some other way (i.e. from a cab). They'd still be on the road the same amount of time, and thus there's still the same bigger chance of an accident.

The way you're analyzing frequency, the only thing that's changed is that the accident risk which would've been concentrated upon a single Uber vehicle is now distributed among multiple cabs. The cumulative total risk is the same for both cases. In fact, if the cabs are roaming the streets looking for people waving them down the traditional way, they represent a higher accident risk than a service where you key in a request in your phone and the nearest available stationary car is notified to go pick you up. If you think about it, that's really all Uber and Lyft are - a way to increase the radius at which a cab driver can "see" people waving them down, so they don't have to constantly drive around empty while distractedly looking for people waving them down on the side of the street. The stuff about cab medallions and regulation are just operational minutiae that don't really add or detract from the increased productivity offered by this aspect of the service.

The fact that people aren't in the position to audit their books and look to see that they're in compliance with reasonable safety standards.

That's really California's fault though. When I took my car in for a bi-annual smog check in Massachusetts, they also tested a whole slew of things including my wipers and headlight aim. When I take my car in for a bi-annual smog check in California, all they do is check the emissions.

You cannot cite compliance with safety standards as a reason to ban a certain type of activity, while you are simultaneously ignoring enforcing those same standards in the general case. Well, actually you can, but that would be hypocritical. Which I guess is pretty normal when it comes to California law. There are numerous other nonsensical inconsistencies I've noticed over the years.

Screwdrivers can be used for many constructive commercial purposes. They can also be used to break into a house. Do you ban the sale and use of screwdrivers out of fear of house break-ins? Ideally the answer should be based on the net difference in productivity gains from constructive uses minus losses from break-ins. Unfortunately that's not what I'm seeing. Drones are being banned out of paranoia with no consideration for the positive ways they can contribute to the economy and our lives.

We've even got the default state wrong. Absent a clear Constitutional rationale for banning drones, they are (or at least should be) legal to use and operate. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

(Disclaimer: A friend needed overhead pictures of his rural commercial property at higher-than Google Maps resolution, and asked me to take the pictures. We had to rent a helicopter at $750/hr. Due to the cost, we had to rush and the pictures though usable weren't as ideal as we'd have liked. For the approx $1200 we paid, we could've bought our own drone and tried this as many times as we liked until the pictures were perfect. So the beneficial uses of drones are pretty damn obvious to me.)

that is because in our country ($DE), taxi companies are under the protection of the local governments. Somebody should just say it out loud: public cartel.

Remember, you can't bypass thermodynamics. Water is the end-product of burning hydrogen. So any energy released when you convert hydrogen to water, is also energy you must put back to convert water back into hydrogen. You can't get something for nothing. Otherwise you create a perpetual motion machine where you burn hydrogen for energy, convert the water back into hydrogen, then burn the hydrogen again for more energy, repeat.

Electrolysis is just a way of putting that energy back into water to convert it into hydrogen. It's about 33% efficient, though I read that they've been able to get the efficiency up to 67% in the lab. In that respect, hydrogen generated by electrolysis is just a battery. You're storing the energy from the electricity by converting water to hydrogen. Then releasing that energy when you convert the hydrogen back into water.

am interpreting your first question as "Is the expense of electrolysis the main inhibitor of a hydrogen-fuel economy?" I believe the answer is "sorta, but not really." The cheapest way to get hydrogen is from natural gas. The problem is that the whole reason to move to a hydrogen economy is to become carbon-neutral. If you use natural gas mines, you defeated the purpose.

Not really. Natural gas is methane - CH4. It's about 35-85x more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. If you're converting methane to hydrogen, then converting that to CO2, you're not reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but you're still helping reduce the greenhouse effect.

All this is of course contingent on what would have happened to the methane if you weren't using it as fuel. Methane is primarily a byproduct of oil drilling. Until recently energy prices were low enough that it wasn't cost-effective to capture it, so oil companies just burned it as it came up the wells (those fires you see on top of long poles at oil fields). So since it was going to be converted to CO2 anyway, converting it to hydrogen to be used in fuel cells is actually carbon neutral. If oil production drops enough that we need to drill for methane specifically to keep up production, then it starts being carbon positive.

Sure they are customers. They are paying with their personal data, which Google hords and then sells to third parties.

Well Google is paying for your patronage with their email service, where you hoard emails you use to contact third parties for added value and profit. Therefore Google is the customer and you are the vendor.

See what happens when you redefine "payment" to include things other than cash?

Lot of "owners" think they have such far reaching power over works of art, think they get to dictate what others may and may not do.

The power to dictate what others may or may not do with a work of art doesn't come from the copyright. It comes from the license/purchase agreement the buyer agrees to when purchasing the artwork. Artists are able to get people to agree to those terms because they have copyright and thus exclusive control over sale and distribution. But dictating how buyers use the artwork comes form the terms of the license/purchase agreement itself. The buyer always has the choice to reject the license/contract and not buy the artwork.

There was a case where an artist was commissioned to build a sculpture to fill a courtyard between some buildings. He ended up building a long metal wall which divided the courtyard diagonally. People who worked in the buildings complained that they had to walk around the sculpture, whereas before they could walk straight through the courtyard. So the owners made plans to cut a hole in the middle of the sculpture to allow people to walk through the middle again. The artist sued on the grounds that his contract stipulated the artwork couldn't be significantly modified without his consent. And the court agreed with him. (I can't find the sculpture on Google, so maybe someone else remembers and can provide a reference. I believe the owners ended up removing the sculpture, since their contract with the artist was basically take it or leave it.)

This is also why you have to be very careful when you license or contract something, rather than outright buying it. With a straight sale, the item is yours to do with as you please. Whereas a license or contract may contain terms limiting what you can do with the item even though you may consider it to be "yours". Read the fine print carefully before signing off.

And was very impressed. It was a new 4-drive system I'd put together to operate as both a NAS/fileserver and a host for virtual machines. I had originally intended to use RAID 5, but decided to give ZFS a try after reading about it. My initial config had it booting Ubuntu (maybe Mint? I don't recall), with ZFS for Linux installed as the main non-boot filesystem with one-drive redundancy. I had all sorts of problems with drives dropping out of the array, which I eventually tracked down to the motherboard shipping with bad SATA cables. ZFS handled this admirably. At first I didn't notice one of the drives had dropped, and continued using the system for about a day. When I got the drive working again, as I understand it RAID 5 would have had to do a complete array rebuild because of the changed files. ZFS noticed most of my old data was on the "new" drive and simply validated the checksums as still accurate, then noticed I had written new files and automatically created new redundancy files for them on the "new" drive. The entire "rebuild" only took a little over an hour instead of the 20+ hours I was expecting (how long it takes me to backup the data over eSATA).

If you're wondering why ZFS trusts the checksums on the "new" drive instead of reading the entire file, it will read the entire file and compare it to the checksum every time you access it. Once a month by default, it runs a "scrub" where it reads every file and verifies they haven't suffered bit rot and still match the checksums. Apparently the strategy after a dropped drive is to get the redundant filesystem up and running again ASAP, then do the file integrity scrub afterwards at its leisure. (You can manually force this check at any time with a zfs scrub.)

The other main advantage I'd say is that it's incredibly flexible when you're putting together redundant arrays. RAID 5 normally requires 3+ drives or partitions of the same size. ZFS lets you mix together drives, partitions, files (yes, one of your ZFS "drives" can be a file on another filesystem), other devices like SAS drives, etc. You can even put the 3+ "drives" needed for redundancy onto a single drive if you just want to play around with it for testing.

The only problem I ran into was with deduplication. Dedup was part of the reason I decided to try ZFS, and is one of the features frequently mentioned by ZFS advocates. While dedup does work, it is an incredible memory and performance hog. Writes to the ZFS array went from 65+ MB/s (bunch of mixed random files) down to about 8 MB/s with dedup turned on, and memory use climbed to where I ordered more RAM to bump the system up to 16 GB. In the end I decided the approx 2% disk space I was saving with dedup wasn't worth it and disabled it.

I eventually switch to FreeNAS (based on FreeBSD, which has a native port of ZFS) because it was annoying having to reinstall ZFS for Linux after an Ubuntu/Mint update, and I couldn't see myself doing that after every new release because I wanted features which were added to the core OS. (And if you're wondering, dedup performance is just as bad under FreeNAS.)

Netflix ran into the same issue with their app for Android. If their explanation is correct, then you can blame Hollywood. Supposedly the studios require a separate validation and certification on every different hardware platform. They want verification that the video stream has been tested to be secured via encryption so that it cannot be captured. Otherwise they withhold copyright permission to stream to that app. So the app producers have to create a whitelist of which hardware devices have been tested and certified, and only those devices are allowed to download and run the app.