Comment Re: Do they get smaller? (Score 1) 109
So for example, I recently did a 6 hour round trip. On the way back I stopped for 6 minutes to charge and use the bathroom.
So for example, I recently did a 6 hour round trip. On the way back I stopped for 6 minutes to charge and use the bathroom.
As far as I'm aware they don't get any subsidies at all from the government. There used to be a tax break on EVs, but that was withdrawn years ago. You pay the full 20% now.
But unless you have a toilet installed in your car, you have to also walk to the bathroom first.
I know, you piss in a bottle with one hand while handling the petrol pump with the other. I guess for you it is slower.
If your skills are in demand, being in the office demands a premium. I'd expect to be paid for the time commuting, and the cost of commuting, and some on top for the hassle. I don't really want to work more than 37.5 hours a week, so that costs a lot extra.
They build houses like that too in some countries. Everything fabricated in a factory, large parts taken to site and assembled. Not quite the whole house on the back of a truck, but similar benefits for quality and rapid on-site assembly.
It's great because you can customize the house extensively and the CNC machines make it for you, where as the way we build them in the UK by hand means that every change is expensive and often goes wrong anyway.
It's a bit more serious for Apple, because their RAM is tightly coupled with the CPU, on the same substrate. It has to have very specific parameters to operate at the high speeds they need to make their ARM CPU cores competitive, and for their GPUs to perform half decently with unified memory. They need a lot of bandwidth and their CPUs have massive caches, because the ARM ABI is just not very space efficient compared to x86 and CISC.
That means they are more limited in terms of being able to find alternative suppliers for the RAM they need, and they are going to have to pay top dollar to out-bid AI for it. Without the RAM, they can't even make the CPUs. They lack the flexibility of having a separate CPU/GPU and RAM, both are required to make an M series part.
I do wonder about the hardware RNG on the STM32. They say it passes various randomness tests, and I'm sure they are right, but those tests aren't the be-all and end-all. I'd want to mix it with other sources of entropy.
It's being promoted by the President of the United States and by Federal agencies. It's mainstream and something that lay people will be interacting with. You can justifiably call them blithering idiots for trusting anything POTUS says, but it's definitely relevant news.
Something like an MG S5, for example. CUV shape with plenty of space and a decent boot, 250 miles even in winter at motorway speeds, charges faster than your bladder discharges, autopilot and a nice interior, and while the list price is about 33k with tax, they are actually sold for about 23k with tax for the long range top spec model. That's GBP so convert to USD and it's about 30k, depending on the exchange rate today.
Because Tesla only makes a few models, and I think only the Y and 3 are available in China. With Chinese batteries, BTW.
Also because they are aspirational. A lot of Audis are crap, they charge a subscription for heated seats. Range Rovers are unreliable and uninsurable, but people think they compensate for their micro penis.
You are getting shafted by the lack of competition from Chinese manufactures. Here we can buy a brand new long range EV for around $30k before tax, and it's better than a Tesla.
You greatly underestimate the EU. I know it's hard to imagine politicians that aren't working for corporations first, but the way the EU is set up it's very difficult for them to gain traction. Look at all the pissing and moaning about GDPR, RoHS and so forth. The EU made it happen anyway.
So at least for Europeans that option to side-load any app we want isn't going away. What's more, Google is now required to allow third party app stores on Google Play, and I think it's only a matter of time until those stores are allowed to certify apps themselves.
The thing is, Google is winning. Almost every browser is just a Chrome skin now. Firefox continues its slow spiral into irrelevance.
Funnily enough Firefox recently did the same thing. Integrated AI into the browser, and used AI to find bugs in the code. Shame they couldn't use AI to refactor the code into something that might actually gain some traction. There's a reason why every other browser is a Chrome skin.
If they did act on it, it would be a legal problem as soon as someone on the autism spectrum or otherwise non-neurotypical comes along. In fact I've been accused of being AI more than once, due to certain phrases that apparently AI is fond of. But that's just a mistake, once it happens to someone with a recognized medical condition it becomes discrimination.
It's Netflix. They would have been watching it on a TV.
IN MY OPINION anyone interested in improving himself should not rule out becoming pure energy. -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.