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Comment Re:I grieve for the King's English (Score 4, Interesting) 8

I interpret "unilateral market power" to mean that the suppliers have asymmetric power over the customers. There is little competition once you are locked into an ecosystem.

Sure, you can rent some compute from another company, but you have all these networks and firewalls and databases and data stores you've set up within one company's borders. The competition has similar services, but they're not quite drop in replacements, so you can't just pick up and move to take advantage of better pricing. It can take years to rebuild your infrastructure if you want to escape.

They are also an oligopoly, which limits the need to compete. The customer has very little power to negotiate better terms when there's only one, maybe two, other serious players in the field.

Submission + - SPAM: Birth of a Solar System Witnessed in Spectacular Scientific First

alternative_right writes: Around a Sun-like star just 1,300 light-years away, a family of planets has been seen in its earliest moments of conception.

Astronomers analyzed the infrared flow of dust and detritus left over from the formation of a baby star called HOPS-315, finding tiny concentrations of hot minerals that will eventually form planetesimals – the 'seeds' around which new planets will grow.

Link to Original Source

Comment Re:The Bear (Score 1) 154

One of the reasons The Bear is such a great show is because it pretty accurately represents a lot of the struggles restaurants, that are trying to be excellent, go through to give their diners a great experience. I won't post spoilers, but there are a few notable examples from this season that I can think of.

It should also be noted that the cast of the show were all trained in culinary arts to some degree for the show, and a few of the cast members are actual professional chefs and/or restaurateurs.

When I read "Unreasonable Hospitality" by Will Guidara, I could see a lot of the principles and ideas implemented in the show, and at some of the restaurants I have visited, including Eleven Madison Park (both pre and post vegan), which Will was instrumental in turning into a world class restaurant.

And really, that's all these restaurants are doing - trying to elevate the experience they can offer above and beyond the food, because, to be candid, Michelin has given out too many stars in the Bay Area, and there are too many restaurants competing at that level. In my opinion, a city should have no more than one Michelin-starred restaurant per million residents. Last year, Michelin handed out new stars to TEN, count 'em, TEN restaurants in California, and now there are 85 starred restaurants in the state, concentrated in the LA and Bay areas.

Just within the San Francisco city limits, there are 28 Michelin starred restaurants, and 50 in the Bay Area - a total of 5 for every million residents of the SF-SJ-Oakland CSA. It's a little ridiculous.

The whole point of the Michelin Star is that it's supposed to be hard to get, and set you apart from the rest of the crowd. It loses its meaning when they will throw one into your car if you drive around San Fran with your window down for too long.

Submission + - AirBnB hosts complain about not getting a share of "services" hired by customers (phocuswire.com) 1

registrations_suck writes: AirBnB now offers "services" of various kinds that people can add on to a booking. Customers can also of course acquire services on their own. Examples of services include things like a private chef or a message therapist.

Hosts are complaining that since it is their property, they should get a cut, despite them having nothing to do with the service involved. From the article:

"Airbnb hosts bear the brunt of services being carried out on their properties without much benefit to their business, according to experts—and some believe the arrangement could actually be to Airbnb hosts’ detriment.

“[Airbnb is] essentially subletting the property for commercial activities while the owner of the property gets nothing extra for that privilege,” Bowles said.

“If I were the host, I would not be thrilled that local businesses will practice their trade at my property,” said Max Starkov, hospitality and travel consultant. “Especially since I won’t be making a dime!”

Hosts are reacting too, Sloan said. “The thing that we heard most from hosts as soon as this happened was, ‘How do I start direct booking?’”

According to Sloan, Airbnb is leveraging physical assets it doesn’t own, and Bowles contended that it’s the hosts, not Airbnb, who take on the risks.

“The host bears all of the operational costs and risks while Airbnb captures the profit,” Bowles said. “So, you're going to have increased wear and tear on your properties—massage tables, cooking equipment, workout sessions, weights—it's all happening in the host space with no additional compensation.”

What's next? Hosts demanding a fee if someone orders in a pizza or other food?

Comment Re:Why would it be possible (Score 1) 248

That document is about a defective or incorrectly-installed part. Sure, if that's a problem then they should be repaired. It's not clear whether that's related to this crash at all.

You're moving the goalposts from your original suggestion that they shouldn't have a way to shut down the engines in flight at all.

Comment Re:Why would it be possible (Score 1) 248

they aren't well thought out in the configuration present in that aircraft.

That configuration - a switch placed immediately behind each engine's throttle lever - is almost universal in every jet designed since they eliminated the Flight Engineer position.

A320 (basically every Airbus looks similar). 737-300. 747-400. Embraer is weird: they put the start/stop controls immediately in front of the throttles.

I could go on, but the point is: this isn't some poorly-considered design fluke in the 787. This is how it is done, and for a good reason: there are many situations where it's necessary to shut down the engines for safety reasons. Having these controls readily accessible saves lives.

You should write less and read more.

Maybe you should take your own advice.

Comment Re:Why would it be possible (Score 1) 248

To prevent or stop a fire. That needs to be a fast and uncomplicated procedure.

You could add interlock logic: If the aircraft is below $altitude, inhibit the switch. But that ignores use cases like "we're going down and about to crash in a field, let's cut off the engines to reduce the risk of fire."

It's tempting to keep making the logic more complicated: If the aircraft has been airborne for less than $duration and the we're below $altitude, delay shutdown for $x seconds while blaring an alarm, except if this temperature sensor reads high suggesting there's a fire, or excessive fuel flow indicates a leak. This introduces new problems: more bugs due to ever-increasing edge cases; more systemic failures due to a broken sensor; etc. This also means the pilots' mental model is more complicated: you don't want them to flip a switch and then wonder "wait, why didn't that work?", and waste time trying to remember some flowchart from their training.

So the current best-practice solution, used wherever possible, is KISS: Each control does exactly one thing, and it does it in the most immediate and direct way possible. You don't find out about your mistake only after some additional set of conditions are met. It does what the label says, and if you don't like the result, you flip the switch back. It should only be more complicated to prevent a recurring problem.

For the most part, that turns out to be the most safe and reliable design.

Comment Re:Simple... (Score 2) 199

Fortunately, you can usually turn of JUST amber alerts on phones

Unfortunately, they don't have a separate category for "Silver Alerts". Around here they keep sending them as "Extreme Alerts", which ought to be reserved for flash flooding and other things which put large numbers of people in danger, not just one Alzheimer's case.

Comment Re:Add to the power cost of AI (Score 1) 33

You need a problem which is difficult to compute, with predictable difficulty, where the answer can be quickly verified. Few real-world problems meet all of those criteria. Most scientific calculations have to be completely re-run to verify the result, which would make it easy to DoS the server by submitting bogus answers.

Comment 500 means statistically significant health effect (Score 4, Interesting) 136

When CO2 gets above about 500ppm, you'll start to see statistically observable health effects in humans. People who are more susceptible to CO2 toxicity will feel drowsy, run-down, and complain that air quality is noticeably poor. At 1000ppm, about 50% of humans will begin showing these symptoms. At this rate, we'll see 1000ppm in the next century, and maybe faster as America tries so hard to make itself great again.

Comment Telecoms not interested in security (Score 4, Interesting) 10

About twenty years ago, I was privileged to be one of the authors of a security specification written at the behest of cable-based telecom companies that described the detailed design of a system for securing phone conversations that were carried over their networks. https://www.cablelabs.com/spec.... The design specifically started with the assumption that the network was penetrated, and was designed to ensure that the attacker could neither disrupt service nor learn anything useful about the traffic (for example, taken from the specification: "All media packets and all sensitive signaling communication across the network [are] safe from eavesdropping. Unauthorized message modification, insertion, deletion and replays anywhere in the network [are] easily detectable and [do] not affect proper network operation").

Once the specification was completed and it came time to deploy, all the telecom companies decided (whether in concert or individually, I do not know) that they were not going to deploy the design. When the lead security VP at one of the major telecom companies explained their decision to me: "We don't need gold-plated security like you've designed: we have firewalls"; I knew that the battle was lost. I also wondered how long it would be before the kind of intrusion like the one described in the article would occur.

Frankly, I'm amazed that it took this long; perhaps, though, what took the time was not the fact of a thorough intrusion, but, rather, the detecting of one.

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