It exists for the sole purpose of benefiting its investors and whoever may be behind any investment fronts used to push that currency. I wonder who they might be?
I fully agree with your take on this being an exercise in throwing money at a problem until it goes away. He probably didn't even need to go as far as diving headfirst into the world of fussy custom firmware to solve this issue either, Asus hardware comparable to his Linksys equipment is recommended so often that I can't imagine he researched the topic before making his buying decision.
Tesla deserves plenty of accolades just for getting to the point where they are producing multiple models of vehicle that conform to or exceed modern standards of quality .
However, Tthey have only managed to build "a" luxury sedan, "a" crossover SUV, and will soon be building "a" budget-luxury sedan. The real challenge is in attaining and sustaining the pace of development maintained by the rest of the industry. The automotive industry at large keeps a rolling cycle of refreshes and replacements on a roughly 3/6 year timetable (refreshed after 3 years, replaced after 6). Some niche models (Jeep Wrangler, Mazda Miata) stay in production far longer than that average but a 3/6 cycle is also a bit too long in ultra-competitive categories such as the compact crossover segment.
This is where I see Tesla beginning to struggle as their entirely bootstrapped operation has struggled to meet deadlines. That is cause for concern as it places their current lineup at a competitive disadvantage as their competition has gone through at least 1 refresh, if not a full replacement, since the design of their most recent model (Model X) was set in stone.
The Model S design was largely set in stone by 2009, 2010 at the latest and the Model X design was mostly locked in by 2012, 2013 at the latest. It took 3 years for both of those designs to actually reach showroom floors (2012 and 2016 respectively) so while the clock hasn't run out in terms of production life, the designs themselves are beginning to become dates. I don't just mean "design" as in styling, I mean it as the all-encompassing architecture of the vehicles.
While Tesla's offerings have several unique attributes which cannot be found in any of their closest competitors, one can only push an old design for so long before it becomes completely unappealing to consumers, even when sold at break even prices. I dare say that such a scenario may be playing out with the Model S as its sales had slumped leading up to the 2016 refresh that boosted sales, yet the bump still fell short of that model's best sales quarter which occurred back in 2015. The fact is that the Model S was designed to achieve the minimum level of refinement expected of a 2010-era, $65,000 luxury sedan with the silent, powerful electric powertrain being the plan to make up for its shortcomings in the areas of ride quality and interior fit and finish. Now that ~7 years have passed, the high end, mid-size sedan offerings from mass market brands have caught up to the Model S in many areas.
The Model S may smoke a Nissan Maxima in straight line and the Maxima can't hold a candle to the silence of the Tesla's powertrain but it also costs ~$35,000. In my opinion, it also has a better finished interior and more up-to-date styling than the Model S. We can argue all day over these points but you have to admit that manufacturers like Nissan are at least getting within striking distance in certain areas with cars costing half the price. Tesla needs to seriously step up their development game lest they be left behind with woefully dates products that simply cannot be discounted enough to remain appealing.
Land utilization is the issue. The largest solar farms in the US requires an order of magnitude more land to produce the same amount of power as a relatively average nuclear plant.
The largest solar farm in the US, the Topaz Solar Farm in California, covers 25sq/km has a peak generation capacity of 550MW. The source uses the median of the 59 nuclear plants in the US to arrive at its 3.36sq/km (1.3sq/mile) per 1,000MW figure but the largest nuclear plant ever built, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan, produces ~8MW on just 4.2sq/km of land which makes it twice as efficient in terms of land use as the median US plant.
That places solar at 13.75 sq/km per 1,000MW compared to nuclear's 0.525sq/km using the best case scenario for the density of existing sources. That doesn't even account for the variable output of the solar plant versus the consistency of nuclear generation. Solar is ultimately far too land hungry to ever serve as the world's primary source of electrity.
>"Also interestingly, part of his motivation is explicitly monetary: he wants his life savings to go to his family, not a nursing home."
That sentiment may seem strange to most people but I think it's more than just a logical conclusion, it's an emotional one as well.
We recently lost one of our family's matriarch's (grandmother-in-law) after her long battle with a failing cardiovascular system. After one particularly difficult evening, she realized her time was about to come and asked her husband to stay by her side while she passed in their home. Unfortunately, her end did not come easily and a relative convinced my grandfather-in-law to call an ambulance when she went into respiratory arrest as it was shockingly painful to watch. She was taken to the hospital and placed in the ICU where she was stabilized but only at the footstep of death's door. The miracles of modern medicine managed to keep her borderline comatose body alive for almost a month in the ICU before the family could come to agreement on sending her to hospice.
That month in the ICU cost almost everything they had worked their entire lives for and was intended to be passed down to their children and grandchildren. Two lifetime's worth of hard work and thoughtful planning went to cover the cost of just one last month of "life".
My point in sharing that story is that the true cost of that month isn't measured in dollars and cents, it's measured in the loss of the legacy they had worked so hard to build. Neither of them viewed their estate as something as simple as "money". Instead they saw it as things like "college tuition for the grandchildren", "a wedding gift to help the grandkids start their married life", "land my ancestors have lived on for generations", and "one last vacation for the whole family". That's what I mean when I saw they lost their legacy and why it's as much or more of an emotional decision than a cold calculation of financial realities.
The way I read it, the point was that "another first virus" wasn't likely to be designed as a benign proof of concept by a tinkerer who meant no harm. The author's view is that the Morris Worm was a happy accident in that it grabbed all the attention owed to the first virus to affect networks on a global scale but it did so without causing any real and lasting harm.
1. "Driver-less cars have vastly shorter stopping distances at all speeds"
I can understand your expectation of reduced stopping distances due to the near-0 reaction time made possible by sufficient computing power. However, I wouldn't describe the computer's advantage as anything close to a "vast" one. There is no mechanical advantage to braking that is inherent for a driverless car and the difference in stopping distance due to reaction time is less than 1 car length (~10ft) at 30mph assuming the human driver has an average reaction times (0.25s). The advantage is still limited to roughly ~25ft at 60mph. That advantage is simultaneously significant and insignificant in that incredibly common outside factors will more than account for that disparity if not controlled for in the AI's programming. Tire pressure, tread depth, brake pad thickness, rotor wear, alignment, etc are all capable of individually accounting for a ~25ft reduction in stopping distance which leads me to my second point.
2. "Driver-less cars should never drive at a speed where they can't stop in time."
Real world driving conditions present so many uncontrolled variables that a speed considered "safe" by that logic will be pathetically slow. The current state of the art in driverless cars is Google's purely autonomous design which is limited to the pace of a golf cart (25mph). The number of variables introduced by vehicle condition and maintenance alone are so great that any vehicle capable of accurately accounting for each one would be impossibly expensive to buy and crushingly expensive to maintain. While all of our cars are capable of measuring speed (the legal maximum is +/- 5mph @ 50mph in the US, but +/-1-2% is most common) and most cars can measure tire pressure (+/-15% for the most common systems which measure indirectly with the ABS sensor), they don't measure either of those things accurately according to manufacturer specs and things only get worse over time. Personally, I can't see driverless cars ever growing past that hurdle, winding up limited to inner-city commuting/taxi duty.
3. "Same is true of balls and other small fast moving objects, they are not going to ping as kids."
This is actually one of the best examples of why speeds will have to remain slow enough to guarantee a negligible stopping distance.
If a human sees a ball roll into the street from behind an obstruction, they will reasonably deduce that there is a likelihood that a kid is chasing after it and slow down before the danger presents itself. An AI will see the balloon or ball and it will have to treat it as either a complete non-issue or as a mortal danger. If it treats it as a non-issue, it will have to be in a constant state of readiness to stop in the smallest reasonable distance, that means limiting speeds to a relatively glacial pace. If it treats it as a mortal danger, it will constantly produce false positives which leads to frustrated passengers when it brakes hard for every trashbag that blows across a 70mph highway.
That's one of my main criticisms of driverless cars in their current state. They are measurably superior in the areas in which human drivers are most flawed, yet their logic leads them to make decisions that no human would ever consider as logical. Even the most state of the art AI isn't even close to being able to account for the nearly infinite number of exceptions that stem from the chaos of the real world and which require an action contradictory to a principle of placing safety first. Just look at the first "unforced error" reported by the Google program where the AI's logic misjudged the actions of a bus due to logic which defined exceptions around the distance needed to merge on to a road. It just went for the merge, turning straight into the side (pretty much in the middle) of a bus moving at 15mph. No human would have made that decision.
Amazon isn't manufacturing these products either. They're just cutting out the middleman and going straight to the source in exactly the same manner as grocery stores do with their private labels.
The reason AmazonBasic's offerings tend to dominate their respective markets isn't because they are the cheapest option. They dominate because they are the cheapest option which you can trust to work and continue working for whatever is considered a reasonable lifespan for that category of good.
You're right in that people care about quality, it's just that quality products don't have to cost as much as you think they do.
I think the consumer can only gain from such entries into the market. AmazonBasic products are often just a standardization of a simple product in a market with too many options. Consumers trust Amazon to deliver on their promises and when confronted with a choice between 800+ USB hubs, I'll choose the cheapest option that is guaranteed to work. There is almost 0 utility for the consumer in choosing a "better" USB hub than AmazonBasic's offering but the downside of choosing a "no-name" hub is measurably significant.
The genius in AmazonBasic concept was in realizing that building the better mousetrap doesn't always mean building the best mousetrap, it means building the best mousetrap for the price. There are so many goods with a market that falls into just two categories, ones that work and ones that don't. Whichever brand is able to gain consumers trust in knowing their offering will work will quickly rise to dominate such a market.
Just to add to those two other points, the 360 was Microsoft's leading platform for developing countries and countries with heavy import restrictions.
For example, Brazil's incredibly protective trade policies requires electronics to be made locally if they are to be sold at an affordable price point. The 360 only went on sale there in 2011 when MS opened up a local manufacturing facility and it was the last refuge of the PS2 which only went on sale when local production began in 2009. The Brazilian market isn't large enough for MS to justify duplicate tooling and other custom production equipment needed to produce a local version of the Xbox One. However, the decline in demand for the 360 would have led to excess production capacity, allowing MS to set up a local plant with the excess equipment from underulitized original production lines.
Also, the 360-specific tooling and production equipment has long since been paid off which greatly reduces the cost per unit. The 360 provides MS with a budget offering capable of accessing developing markets which can't support the $300 pricepoint of a current gen console.
I might be out of touch with the latest news regarding Magic Leap but this is the first time I've seen a "live" demo of the technology. Those demo shots were filmed through an actual, working display according to the disclaimer and everything I've seen up to this point had been a pre-rendered "artist's concept".
I have a little more faith in there being something of substance behind their technology now that I know they have working prototypes. I'd only seen a mountain of hype and investment money chasing what seemed to be nothing but a concept and set of patents prior to this.
The later iterations on the concept were vastly superior to the original Eee and Eee clones. Netbooks in the $500 range typically had dual core Atoms (a big deal since the CPU was the weakest link), 10.1" screens that had a resolution that was actually usable (1280x720 instead of 1024x600), and usable amounts of storage.
That market didn't last very long as hardware costs dropped so quickly that full size, full power laptops suddenly cost the same with the only trade off being battery life.
That number is nowhere near accurate as we learned during the South Carolina floods back in October. The state estimates there are between 10,000 and 20,000 unregulated dams in South Carolina alone: http://www.thestate.com/news/local/article41315256.html
Those are the dams that pose the greatest threat. You can't plan for something you don't know about and the threat posed by such an extensive system of "invisible" dams is immense. A small earthen dam on a farm may not pose much of a threat by itself but its failure can cause a cascade of failures further downstream if it breaks when those dams are already at their limit.
The threat posed by small dams and their short designed life expectancy was demonstrated in dramatic fashion earlier this year. The historic flooding that impacted South Carolina's midlands earlier this year was driven by a cascade of dam failures.
Everyone saw the pictures of Columbia, SC but that flooding was mostly due to "normal" causes. The city's drainage system was overwhelmed by rainfall that exceeded historic levels by several orders of magnitude (higher than even a 1,000 year storm) and the Broad river consequently overflowing its banks. However, that wasn't the only place impacted by the storm. South Carolina has an enormous number of small earthen dams, built on private land with the land owner responsible for maintenance.
Obviously, these dams were not built to handle such a storm but even if they were, the lack of oversight led to a lack of maintenance, worsening their chances of surviving the initial floods. As upstream dams broke, downstream dams were subjected to massive surges, causing a cascading series of failures, greatly increasing the amount of damage caused by the storm.
There are 10,000 to 20,000 unregulated small dams in the state according to the state. They pose an enormous risk as the flooding clearly demonstrated but SC isn't alone in sharing this burden.
These populations aren't mentally incompetent, they use chimneys. The issue is that chimney's aren't 100% efficient and only remove the pollution from the home, not the surrounding environment. The pollution becomes pervasive when an entire city of 100,000+ people is cooking with biomass fuel. Your chimney's exhaust is just another person's air when it's as concentrated as you'd find in places like those described in the article.
Some of that is Google's fault but I place most of the blame on the businesses themselves.
I'd understand it if most of the local businesses that forgo an online presence were all 1-4 person, family operations where they're all too old to have a "Google it first" mindset. However the majority of businesses that refuse to register themselves with Google have no excuse. I can search for the closest laundromat, tire shop, florist, etc directly by name and address and the only results will be those sites that scrape the secretary of state's corporate filings.
Google has made the process of creating an online presence the simplest, most painless process imaginable. Google's My Business service gets you on Maps with all the important info (location, hours, services, etc) for free, yet so few businesses take the importance of being a top, location based result. If a business doesn't come up in my location based search it's as good as if it never existed.
The issue of radio spectrum is glossed over in a short bullet-point summary at the end of the article while I believe it deserves to be the article's thesis. The limitations imposed by the radio spectrum and its availability are at the root of every other point made by the author.
You just can't have high bandwidth, excellent protection from interference, and low energy usage all at once. The blcoks of spectrum that offer the best balance of those qualities are already booked up for things like OTA TV broadcasts and "high-cost and high-powered cellular" networks. The issues with mesh networking are also immediately apparent if some classes of device are to be kept on separate networks or have to forgo their role as a node due to the power requirements of a repeater.
A simple example for what airwaves would look like in the crowded "IoT' future is your average apartment complex and the 2.4ghz spectrum. 30+ routers competing for the same tiny space absolutely destroys the quality (latency, throughput, power draw from the devices radio) of the connection. The space is so crowded that you may only see 5-10 networks as the signal from a router 2 stories up is so dirty that you can't even receive the SSID but the interference is still there.
There is only so much spectrum available for use, even if it was all unrestricted. There won't be a mass adoption of networked "things" until someone is able to find a loophole in the laws of physics.