paulftw

I think having a huge plant on a ship means they can staff it with workers from 3rd world countries without worrying about Australian visas, employment laws, etc. It's not uncommon for local miners to earn north of $200k per year.

I was on cruise around Queensland last year - ship never left Australian waters, yet all crew was from Asia and they had a casino on board. Prettty sure it'd be illegal to open a gambling venue like that on the soil

This information makes a lot of sense, and should be on the landing page as (one of) the main selling point(s).

Curious to see whether this system is robust enough for unpredictable outdoor breezes.

looks pretty good for a summer internship project, but nothing more. Why are all these guides uglier than bootstrap?

Where does this liquid helium come from, and more importantly where does it go after it's been heated? Im guessing they release it into atmosphere, so is there enough helium to mine for this plane to go mainstream?

Is there a way to quantify the usage of tools like this? I mean, how many people actually use RelativeWave on a daily basis?

NoFlo, Origami, RelativeWave are all offering this visual programming, but any example I saw was becoming too complicated to follow before it was useful.

While this is a very useful article, recurring attempts to convince readers that privacy is not an issue had an opposite effect on me. I didnt even know spying was a concern, but when out of the blue I'm told "dont worry about privacy", and told five times in a row - well, this makes me suspicious :) More unfortunate is the fact there is only one argument, served multiple times under different sauces: don't use the app if you think it does something creepy; vote with the delete button.

And this is actually a poor excuse:

concerned that google stores your search history and has your email? - dont use google.

Don't like Facebook sharing your friend list with advertisers? - delete your facebook profile.

Don't want your browsing history agregated and sold to the highest bidder? - stop using websites

Worried that government listens to your phone calls and reads your text messages? - move to another country.

To me these constant remarks about how you are always in control of your privacy were just annoying and not convincing at all. The article would be better without that.

If you can slightly distort an image to make NN produce any classification you want that opens many interesting options for steganography.

Funniest application would be distorting individual characters of the printed text so that OCR engine and human would "see" two totally different but meaningful messages. There's likely not enough complexity in the OCR NN to do that, but who knows.

I think LG, like others, is struggling to push this product out in time for Christmas shopping. Won't be surprised if they ship it with rather obvious hardware or design issues.

That "where to buy / coming soon" image is not clickable for me, though it looks like an input field. Anyone else tried using it to find a pre-order form?

Great idea, but after trying it dozen times I still didn't get the most common excuse: "works fine on my machine"

don't forget to share your findings )

What about the past statements of MS executives? e.g. "A Microsoft legal representative has said during a hearing in the European Parliament that open source actually presents a higher vulnerability risk."

Read any startup book or blog: you can have a grand vision but you must start solving one small problem and expanding from there. Winning one niche and then scaling.

When you go after everything at once you go after nothing in particular.

I don't know how Intel operates. Did they start building a 90nm factory before they finalised the process of making a 90nm chip? Can they upgrade a 90nm plant to start producing 45nm, and will it cost less than half of the original spend?

As for pharmaceuticals - I'd expect their plants to a) be capable of producing multiple different compounds and b) equipment to be modular. Research & clinical trials are expensive, reconfiguring equipment to make newly discovered drug is cheap. Once proven to work, drug can be replicated fairly quickly and cheaply, that's why they push so hard against any patent law reform.

I'm not saying this is wrong or right. I'm asking whether we should stop dreaming about quick charging cars that can travel 1000 miles.

It's not the fact they invest in manufacturing, it's the size of the investment compared to company size/assets.

Factory is supposed to pay for itself before its product becomes deprecated. Looking at how expensive this gigafactory is - how many years will it take before profits from selling li-ion batteries cover the equipment & construction costs?

Some projections say peak output is expected by 2019-2021. Doesn't this imply that today's technology will still be competitive and in demand 6-7 years from now?

I'm assuming gigafactory uses chemicals and tech that powers current generation of Tesla cars. Because if they had something significantly better they would not care about 2019, but would instead die to get it to market ASAP. Not caring about unit price or volumes. Just to prove that it works and to capture the high end market.

And my second assumption is they don't plan to lose money on this project.

All I wanted is take this patent out of the equation forever.

My thinking is that I've created prior art that would make the idea much much harder to patent. Not a patent lawyer, so may be wrong.

As for how harmful it was for my anonymity to mention Sydney - well, NSA knows way more than that. Besides, I could be sending you all down the wrong trail. or better - confusing a ML algorithm.

Usually, when you start investing in manufacturing, that means R&D has achieved all it could.

So is this factory a sign that Tesla is settling down on the current levels of cell capacity, charging times, weight, etc?

I.e. they don't believe in a breakthrough before 2020, do they?

I guess a software could insert a "blink break" every couple of minutes. They could even display an a video commercial during that time, to monetize your blinks. Since everyone seems to try to patent everything: in this comment I claim the invention of a killer business model for speed reading apps. 25 Feb 2014, 4:30pm Sydney time :)

It is really great that they have guts to admit the failure. Though this confession is a bit overdue, I hope they've learned the lesson and some day will come back with a better solution. No doubt that the problem is really worth solving.

Don't know whether I should spoil the secret or keep it to myself, but why don't you submit again? and again. until it gets in.

Time will tell why they bought Easel, for now it seems Github decided to go after Dribble (or geocities?)

I think most interesting blogs are written in the most boring setting - when author is not distracted, just crafts content for hours in the comfort of their living room. So this may be fun for sharing shortlived experiences, but likely worthless for good reads.

Regarding 2. 'add item button is too small' - I'd personally try a large-ish grey plus icon in the middle of a column, that is only visible when that column is hovered.

Similar? compare California to Texas, and then compare Spain to Czech Republic. Apple needed to partner with one carrier - AT&T to sell phones in all 50 states. What's the minimum number of carriers you need to partner with in order to have a friendly carrier in each EU country?

Your "counterexample" is young political activists, probably local party leaders. Those are multicultural, openminded and all. What about the average middle class, representing probably 90-99% of the buying power?

I agree that it's not impossible to sell in multiple countries at once, but it's just times bigger investment to get smaller combined market than US.

For Apple starting with US was a justification to spend probably billions on iPhone. Market was big enough for this gamble to make sense. You can't justify huge investments if your plan to start in Poland and then expand to Romania and Turkey. Or did that company go into all 3 countries simultaneously? And, btw, combined GDP of Czech Republic, Poland, Romania and Turkey is 1.65 trillion. GDP of USA is 16.86 trillion.

Another one is http://brython.info/

Following the same logic we'd have something better than windows8 dominating the market by now. It's so easy to bring a new desktop pc or a laptop to market. Where are new disruptive desktop OSes? Where were they when the market was still growing?

Every european country has own laws, culture and language. They are individual markets, and each market is too small to break even after all the R&D and hardware costs.

iphone started without carrier support, maybe. (There was some sort of an at&t deal, i dunno, doesn't matter) But the point is that was then, we now live in a different world. Apple gave invented the smartphone market as we know it. Nowadays market is mature - it's nearly impossible to disrupt it.