jp555

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271.
by jp555 9y ago
Imagine how much personal income tax Apple’s 100,000+ employees pay, accross all jurisdictions, and all the VAT tax collected for their products sold around the world. Those leeches!
272.
by jp555 9y ago
How is this narrative still around? It only takes a few minutes of searching to find out that Apple pays more US tax than almost any other corporation in the country (just a couple oil companies pay more). Apple pays $16B of the total $450B
273.
by jp555 9y ago
"Cameras are supposed to capture reality" This seems like an ironic fantasy to me, because I don't think there is such a thing as an objective reality. Human vision is not objective in the slightest. The objective reality we
274.
by jp555 9y ago
hey if they don't find ET, that laser array will be a decent city-vaporizing space weapon.
275.
by jp555 9y ago
Apple has deep seated values throughout the organization that it's been nurturing for 40 years. I think a mismatched CEO would either lose fighting it, or destroy the core of what makes Apple great, which shareholders will not like.
276.
by jp555 9y ago
> money is a human-made construct Like the alphabet, and just a useful.
277.
by jp555 9y ago
> You cannot make things dark Magic Leap has hinted that their hardware will be able to do this. You assume current LCD tech, but there are NEW things being built.
278.
by jp555 9y ago
Agreed, Niantic makes horrible software. PoekmonGo is still after a year of updates very unstable and absolutely devastating on your battery
279.
by jp555 9y ago
I have a blurry recollection of seeing an aircraft design that was a combination of an airplane and a dirigible. It looked like a poofy manta ray, an inflated rigid lifting body or flying wing. It wasn't quite VTOL & needed a very
280.
by jp555 9y ago
What do you think about Intel's monolithic dies vs. AMD's approach to packaging smaller dies together onto a socket-mount and linking them with "Infinity Fabric" into a single CPU? Seems to me yields would be a lot bette
281.
by jp555 9y ago
In the video he says it holds up well to sitting on it, but anywhere your hands are (steering wheel, shifter), it wears away in just weeks . I can imagine a similar problem with the hand rest area on the laptop.
282.
by jp555 9y ago
Not to mention Alcantara is a pretty horrible product that will wear away quickly - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aebUNgMhQV4
283.
by jp555 9y ago
Many things have gone from extremely costly to almost free (Aluminum used to cost more than gold, now we wrap food in it), but that just freed up those resources to be allocated to something else where there is scarcity. This is what the fo
284.
by jp555 9y ago
The human capacity for desire is infinite. We will never stop learning to do more with less (economizing = economy). Do you also believe everything that will ever be invented has already been invented? Less resource allocation for X means m
285.
by jp555 9y ago
That's a good point, but system complexity and failure risk is also a liability that needs to be considered. A few meters of ice around your ship will be pretty much 100% reliable and require zero power, but for the considerable extra
286.
by jp555 9y ago
Well, if you've got people on board, you're going to need lots of water anyway. I guess it depends on the cost of lifting mass out of Earth's gravity well compared to the cost of making a highly reliable plasma shield.
287.
by jp555 9y ago
I can imagine a plasma shield for interplanetary spacecraft would require a lot of power to run, which would then require even more equipment to radiate away the waste heat. That seems like it would come with a lot of potential failure poin
288.
by jp555 9y ago
I largely agree, although I think mixed-reality will be the new UX, with voice & AI being a big part of it as well. But we may need 2 orders of magnitude in GPU/Watt performance before light-field glasses replace 2D screens. Give
289.
by jp555 9y ago
They wont be good enough for light-field-based mixed-reality computing just like command line computers weren't good enough for GUIs. How many more computers will we probably buy before mixed-reality jumps the chasm and goes mainstream
290.
by jp555 9y ago
Imagine you pay income tax in your residence country, making web software for global clients. If you sell your product in another country, should you have to also pay income taxes in that country or just the VAT tax for the sale?
291.
by jp555 9y ago
That's 0.005% on profits, but they remitted all the EU VAT taxes they collected, and paid all employee income taxes. If as you say most of their corporate activity is in the US (where they paid over $10B in corporate taxes last year),
292.
by jp555 9y ago
I can't imagine how you're looking at it. Monopoly is not the right word. Successful is the word. How is it Apple's fault that all the other smartphone makers combined run at a loss?
293.
by jp555 9y ago
They paid an average of ~25% tax last year.
294.
by jp555 9y ago
"monopoly profits and tax evasion have enabled Apple to amass a cash pile of a quarter of a trillion dollars." Since when is ~15% market share a monopoly? Apple was the largest corporate tax payer in America last year (when were t
295.
by jp555 9y ago
We are already machine hybrids. The alphabet is technology. “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural p
296.
by jp555 9y ago
light fields are nothing at all like the 2D image emitted by DLP projectors. This is a printed light field - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AVAzGQMxEg This is a light field plenoptic projector - https://www.you
297.
by jp555 9y ago
The machine that makes the machine is what hints rapid developments are coming. That machine is the global smartphone component supply chain. It's a very different environment than when VR was build upon the desktop PC component supply
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by jp555 9y ago
That's true, but is kinda like saying we've had pen computing since the early 1960s - http://www.cadazz.com/cad-software-Sketchpad.htm . Exponentials are never easy but I think we're about to see huge strides
299.
by jp555 9y ago
Remember PocketPC smartphones? That's about where we are in the VR tech S-curve. They were horrible devices when compared to today's smartphones, just as the VR/AR 5 years from now will make today's tech seem. But we pro
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by jp555 9y ago
I think that a small effort must approach things more from a bootstrapping of minimal effective steps. I've found this often incompatible with the design-by-comitee approach of government procurement bureaucracy. A government approach

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