I'd guess because the market isn't really there when wire is extremely cheap and the building codes require more outlets than most people need. The wire for your sconce has already been run through the wall, it's at an outlet. Managing cables is not that hard.
Power tools are a bit different because they need to fit into any given tight space about once, and can't rely on wall power being nearby. Your sconce and kitchen appliances don't work on the same assumption.
> and the building codes require more outlets than most people need
Does it, though? Never in my life I've seen a house anywhere in the countries I've been to, that would have a sufficient number of outlets. Myself I think corded devices are fine, but houses come with way too few outlets.
> I do have a Mac but ___ can’t be replicated on my specific dev-tainted environment, plus I’m using macOS Y and you use macOS Z which is a pain for me to set up a VM for, if at all possible.
The raise of a few free macOS CI mitigated that a bit but the offer is honestly poor (except at CircleCI, props to them), and seems like Apple could care less so much they’re now actively making that harder than ever.
> I’m using macOS Y and you use macOS Z which is a pain for me to set up a VM for, if at all possible
If Apple should be sued for anti-consumer behavior this is why... It costs time and money to fix software with every MacOS release and I'm getting close to suggesting we add a 50% Apple tax on products to pay for the additional support it entails.
He said it was a pain. Not that it can’t be done. If you are running on a Mac, you can set up a VM for an older version of MacOS on it. It’s allowed in the EULA.
As a matter of fact I went through the trouble to set up 10.9 through 10.14 in VirtualBox, driven by gitlab-runner via the virtualbox executor[0] (which is pure genius: it uses linked VM clones from a reference VM to spawn parallel runners, as well as using snapshots once SSH is ready after first boot for <2s spawn + full state reset).
Given the painful macOS on VirtualBox situation, at the time I wanted to move to VMware Fusion[1] but lacked time to implement an executor. It seems someone took that in their own hands and implemented a specific runner (in Swift!).
The freakonomics podcast had a decent episode about this. They frequently host liberal economic ideas as well, so don't assume the opinions come from some landowner backed think tank.
I want a single family home because it has no shared walls and a private backyard space for my kids and dog. It's not that hard to find condos or apartments with decent floor space.
You have to watch out for the TVs that attempt to connect to public networks. So pray your neighbors have passwords on their wifi and didn't opt in to Comcast's hotspots.
I'm not sure why they used "screenshot", because they actually take a fingerprint/hash of the material being displayed. It's much more compact and way more practical.
I'm not sure if smart TVs come with always on recording capabilities (Siri, Alexa style) yet but that's a possible avenue to leak private audio of your viewing area.
Smell-o-vision: a device that can be programmed to release smells.
Here's the pitch:
Art has the power to move minds, and a startup that expands the creative power of artists by letting them paint with smells could change the world.
There's a ___ billion dollar market for smells. Theme parks, film and streaming, extended reality, and commercial retail. It's our most powerful tool to trigger recognition. Today we use primitive devices with fixed scents, but there's no search engine for smells there's no reprogrammable scratch and sniff - we're using analog smells in a digital world.
We want to revolutionize the way we smell by democratizing scent. Provide new technologies to discover and recreate smells in any environment, at home or on location.
The applications are endless. We can train medical professionals and industrial workers to recognize dangerous scents without putting them in harms way. We can create the next generation of virtual experience, expanding art into new dimensions.
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This has been done before, going back to the 60s. It's kind of niche but the practical issues of building a device that can do it and one that people will buy have been insurmountable.
Why not NaN for floating point division and INT_MAX for integer division?
When you write code that may divide by zero you need to check the result afterwards (and in truly defensive programming that is every time you divide numbers). 0 is not a great choice because it doesn't necessarily mean you divided by zero - in floating point, dividing by a sufficiently large number or when working with the status register set to flush denormals to zero then normal division can result in 0. For integer division, any fraction will result in 0.
The hard part of electric vehicle has never been assembly - its batteries and charging. Toyota and VW can ramp up as much as they want, but they'll probably have to buy the batteries from Tesla.
Tesla is not without its problems, but I think it's a bit naive to focus on the solved problems as limiting their potential. It's also the wrong thing to look at - Tesla is concerned about dictating the future of transportation and energy, selling cars is a means to an end.
Why would Toyota and VW need to use Tesla batteries? Patents after all expire and are circumventable. And AFAIK Tesla does not hold too much original IP on battery tech to start with.
What Toyota and VW have is politics and that's why they are still trailing behind Tesla. Big parts of their engineers and managers have expertise and background in internal combustion engines and this means much more coupling with this technology. A turnaround in such businesses is much harder than in software, so I expect that only those of the traditional manufacturers who can rebuild their strategies and sell it to their middle management to survive the next decade or two.
2. Most consumers have no next to no information that wasn't given to them by the marketing departments of the companies, so that isn't an argument against basic regulation on things like consumer freedom.
Consumers are free to buy other things, like yourself. It doesn't sound like regulation was necessary, as the free market provided products that fit your needs.
I fundamentally disagree with the notion that government should have a say in design decisions for consumer products past safety and environmental concerns. I don't design things to support every consumer use case, I don't document it so those use cases can be supported, and I don't take it personally if a consumer chooses a competing product because it fits their use cases better. If enough consumers do that, I support those cases.
There is plenty of consumer freedom in consumer electronics. We don't need the government telling us what they think our customers want.
The regulation doesn’t have to prohibit the existence of the product, but it can ensure that consumers are made explicitly aware before / during purchase: this product requires an internet connection, and may not function without one.
There’s nothing obvious at purchase time that this new breed of Apple laptops require an internet connection to reinstall. That’s what will cause some consumers material harm. If informing your customers up front about your product’s limitations causes your business material harm, maybe your product needs a rethink.
Power tools are a bit different because they need to fit into any given tight space about once, and can't rely on wall power being nearby. Your sconce and kitchen appliances don't work on the same assumption.