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Perhaps the Peter principle applies to bad ideas, as well as people. Perhaps a 'headphone-ports considered harmful' meme has arisen to its level of incompetence within Motorola. And it attempts to propagate itself every decade or so...

In 2006, I remember being bugged that my Motorola SLVR required a special USB headphone jack. Plus, you couldn't charge the phone and use the headset at the same time (say, for listening to music). Other people thought so too... from this phone's top rated Amazon review :
"CONS... No dedicated headphone jack ( form over function compromise)"

So the idea failed and Moto went back to headphone jacks.

Now its 2016. Bluetooth and Apple seem to have encouraged this meme to reemerge at Motorola. So we now have ... the Moto Z Force, with its innovative USB headphone port. And it appears you cannot charge the phone and use the headset at the same time. .

Stafford Beer tried this in Chile and almost ruined the country completely. The original article is taking an absurd assumption about Economics and building it into a completely ridiculous conclusion.

The first two problems: 1. Economics is a dynamic system. It is non-linear and not deterministic, because:
2. Economic behavior is a complex system and unpredictable emergent behavior spontaneously arises from strange places.

Even the most ignorant of /. readers shouldn't fall for such a flawed argument as contained in the original article. Read "Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly (it's free, now) and see if you agree with any part of the source article. http://kk.org/kevinkelly/out-o... Economics is more about human interaction than simply converting resources to goods. (What about services, for instance?) The test space for such a large number of possible interactions is many times greater than the time available in the life of the Universe.

If you would like to read a book that covers similar subject matter but is specifically oriented to Economics, try, "The Origin of Wealth" by Beinhocker: https://www.amazon.com/Origin-... This is actually an incredible book, and techies will relate well to it.
 

Motorola did this five years ago with ATRIX. Didn't catch on then, but I though it was interesting at the time.

This isn't a new idea. Kantorovich (one of the inventors of linear programming) considered this venue of economic optimization himself, but the technology of the day wasn't up to the task and the bureaucracy didn't want to be displaced either. Some of his suggestions inspired the reforms that later got implemented by Kosygin, but the Soviet economy was rather distorted by subsidies at that point, so a lot of those reforms got rolled back.

There was also the fear that linear programming, with its shadow prices, would covertly smuggle capitalism into communism. See also Red Plenty for a half-fictionalized account of Kantorovich's attempts (or the Crooked Timber post, In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You).

Beyond that, there's Towards a New Socialism which is an idea/plan of how to run a socialist centrally planned society with modern technology. It uses sparse linear programming for the plan construction part and is based on sortition for government to diminish the inevitable corruption that comes with concentrating economic power like any CPE does. Would it work? Who knows? It may be interesting in the utopian sense anyway.

Tangentially related (speaking of scientific communism/socialism), there's also Project Cybersyn, the project to use cybernetics to run socialist Chile. That wasn't based on linear programming, though. If linear programming is the neat route, Cybersyn would be the scruffy route. Again, who knows whether it would have worked; if Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries is anything to go by, a considerable part of the problem was that of bureaucracy and what the people were used to. Managers didn't use the system because it felt cumbersome to do so, etc.

This article talks about it.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/08...

More info
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/...
https://www.internetretailer.c...

Amazon even has this for free!

Good points, but $299 or $399 or $499 for those as features? I'd rather either be rude and watch my phone or, better yet, untether myself from my phone and listen to someone's conversation without requiring instantaneous updates from social media rather than shell out that kind of cash for that.

That's why you get the previous generation
https://www.amazon.com/Motorol...
Moto 360 watches ranging from 79 - 179.

VCRs haven't competed against DVDs for a long time. If you buy a movie, it has come on DVD (or blue-ray) for over a decade.

Well, you'd certainly think so. And in terms of competing, you're right. But amazingly, you can still buy movies in VHS format.

And Disney VHS cassettes come with DRM, so you can't always convert them to DVD yourself.

You just need a video "stabilizer"

Yeah, it might be hard to figure out how to obtain parts overnight: https://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=U...

Same here regarding economics. For an education in the crap thats been going on, I highly recommend nakedcapitalism.com -- it is owned, hosted and moderated by former economists from Goldman Sachs among other things... kind of an expose' site, with books to their name, etc. Also "Killing the Host" by Michael Hudson.

In his most recent novel The Peripheral , about a near-future America, William Gibson also envisioned one's mobile phone eventually being usable a virtual-reality headset. Since so much functionality (bank cards, photography) is being integrated into the mobile phone, then it seems a safer bet for a company than trying to introduce awkward standalone hardware into the market.

You could us USB-OTG with a smartphone to add GIO and https://www.amazon.com/Plugabl... ethernet.
The Pi is probably a better solution for say CNC machine and frankly for your wifi bridge I would suggest one of the old TP-Link Wifi Routers running wrt. You will bet much better performance than the PI using the shared USB ethernet on the Pi.

Nintendo probably doesn't want to cannibalize sales of its current console that uses the pointing technolgy (Wii U). And the controller itself isn't necessarily cheap. Nintendo charges in the neighborhood of $35 for a Wii Remote Plus, plus whatever two clusters of IR LEDs on a stick would cost.

Nintendo probably doesn't want to cannibalize sales of its current console that uses the pointing technolgy (Wii U). And the controller itself isn't necessarily cheap. Nintendo charges in the neighborhood of $35 for a Wii Remote Plus, plus whatever two clusters of IR LEDs on a stick would cost.

You certainly don't need a $400, pc. I have an HP streambox that I got second hand for $75, here's a new option for around $100; https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014...

I've had too much trouble trying to use Linux on my set top. Now that Netflix works, HBO doesn't, and who knows which ones will work in 6 months. I decided to stick with windows 10, in tablet mode.

I now have a Elecom optical trackball that is as good if not better than the Logitech ones. There also excist a wireless one. Both are great and the extra buttons are great as well.

I also tried the SANWA SUPPLY PC Trackball Mouse USB but that does not feel right.

If you want a replacement, go for the Elecom one. I can recomend bith the wired and wireless one as I have both.

I now have a Elecom optical trackball that is as good if not better than the Logitech ones. There also excist a wireless one. Both are great and the extra buttons are great as well.

I also tried the SANWA SUPPLY PC Trackball Mouse USB but that does not feel right.

If you want a replacement, go for the Elecom one. I can recomend bith the wired and wireless one as I have both.

Her patented product called BedBand consists of a set of shock cords, clamps and locks designed to keep fitted bed sheets in place.

From the third paragraph of TFA.

This is about patents being infringed. Claiming that it is about racism is silly.

https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref...

There are many products that directly rip off of her product, and are mostly from Chinese companies. Are you going to deny that they copied a patented item?

Or $50 on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Trendma...

The funny thing is that most of the people I know who are hardcore console fanbois knocking PC gamers... spend A LOT more money on consoles.
Sure, they got their PS4 or XBone for $300-400, but then you start adding stuff like fancy controllers (and hey, you need two of those so a buddy can play, right), some fancy headsets, skins/mods, etc etc and pretty soon you're well past what a semi-decent gaming rig would cost.

Aaaaand then it's obsolete when the console makers give you a big fat finger by release the new 4K model anyhow :-)

Please note that this is for the "elite" fanboi type console gamers. There are plenty of others I know who happily play on both console and PC, and don't go full-retard when it comes to buying lots of overpriced options that they don't need for a decent gaming experience.

The bluetooth connection is required to use the Pokemon Go Plus notifier hardware/wristband that is currently sold out of all suppliers.

https://www.amazon.com/Nintend...

logitech once made a wireless keyboard with an included touch pad intended for console centric use. Yep, found them.

https://www.amazon.com/Logitec...

Iogear makes one with a trackball.

https://www.cdw.com/shop/produ...!

Though I never used them, I just used a TV Tray/Table/lappad with a standard USB keyboard/mouse with a long enough cable.

Or this.

TL:DR; You need to learn HOW to optimize:

@37:30 -- Mike Acton: Code Clinic 2015: How to Write Code the Compiler Can Actually Optimize

- - -

> If you want speed, assembly is the ONLY option.

Total NONSENSE.

A. You keep implying this word optimization -- it doesn't mean what you think it means!

B. There are four lights, er, types of optimizations:

1. Use a lower level language
2. Micro-optimization or Bit-twidling
3. Algorithm
4. Macro or cache-orientated, aka (Data-Orientated Design)

What do these mean?

1. Use a lower level language

With bloated languages and incorrect use of C++, Java, etc., inexperienced programmers naively thing changing to a "lower level" language -- such as C or Assembly -- will help speed up their code. While it is true one has access to more programming paradigms in a low level language, i.e. you can use the carry flag as a return value instead of wasting an entire byte with assembly, this type of optimization only takes you so far before you need to look at alternatives.

2. Micro-optimizations

All good programmers should read (and understand!) these bit twiddling optimizations:

* bit-twiddling hacks
* Hackers Delight

While compilers can generate "good enough code", sometimes hand-optimized instructions can beat the compiler. e.g. Before compilers optimized division with reciprocal multiplication, a common technique for division was to manually change division into reciprocal multiplication. i.e. `/ 3` -> `* 1/3` which means you would see something like this:

int a = 123 / 3;

would be replaced with:

int b = (123 * 65536 / 3) >> 16;

Thankfully most compilers will perform these integer divisions but you can try this out with an online C compiler:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
int a = 123 / 3;
int b = (123 * 65536 / 3) >> 16;
int c = a == b;
printf( "a: %d =%d= b: %d\n", a, c, b );

return 0;
}

These types of micro-optimizations are becoming rarer and rarer as compilers (slowly) get better. However Don't assume. VERIFY your assembly output of the compiler.

Floating-point optimizations still show up. The most famous is probably John Carmack's Quake 3 Inverse Square Root

This PDF provides a very good explanation:

* http://www.lomont.org/Math/Pap...

3. Algorithm

The fastest way to optimize (from the programmer's run-time) is to replace a slower algorithm with a faster one.

i.e.

* If the common case for your data is unsorted, then replacing a dog-slow bubble sort with quick-sort will show gains.
* However, if the common caseis that the is 99% mostly sorted, then changing algorithms may not always help.

This is where most people start to optimize. BUT, notice how I said "Common Case". There is a _higher level_ of optimization we can do:

4. Macro or Cache-orientated.

The 0th rule in optimization is:

Know Thy Data

When you optimize you need to optimize for the common case. This means understanding data flow, Memoization, and transforms. You _must_ question ALL assumptions, knowns, and unknowns. What, exactly, are you trying to do? i.e. Printing Primes and Printing

You can sell that guano for almost 20 bucks a kilo on Amazon.

Bat shit.... Crazy!

I'm assuming that you don't live in the USA and that you don't work in IT. Both apply to me. This is not as easy to do as you claim for a lot of us. First of all, while you can buy SIM cards in the USA, it's difficult. US mobile telephone service isn't really setup to work this way. Everybody expects you to sign a contract with a carrier for a certain number of years. Just walking down to some local electronics store and buying a SIM card off the shelf is not at all how things work in the USA. You have to go to carriers to get SIM cards here and those aren't really setup to be pay as you. You can do that sort of thing if you're willing to use crap disposable phones like with Tracfone, but not so much if you actually have a good phone.

I'm assuming that you don't live in the USA either, because your facts are way out of date. I just ordered a couple of new SIMs off of Amazon yesterday to swap out on phones.
Here are a couple of examples.

• AT&T
• T-Mobile
• Straight Talk

I'm assuming that you don't live in the USA and that you don't work in IT. Both apply to me. This is not as easy to do as you claim for a lot of us. First of all, while you can buy SIM cards in the USA, it's difficult. US mobile telephone service isn't really setup to work this way. Everybody expects you to sign a contract with a carrier for a certain number of years. Just walking down to some local electronics store and buying a SIM card off the shelf is not at all how things work in the USA. You have to go to carriers to get SIM cards here and those aren't really setup to be pay as you. You can do that sort of thing if you're willing to use crap disposable phones like with Tracfone, but not so much if you actually have a good phone.

I'm assuming that you don't live in the USA either, because your facts are way out of date. I just ordered a couple of new SIMs off of Amazon yesterday to swap out on phones.
Here are a couple of examples.

• AT&T
• T-Mobile
• Straight Talk

I'm assuming that you don't live in the USA and that you don't work in IT. Both apply to me. This is not as easy to do as you claim for a lot of us. First of all, while you can buy SIM cards in the USA, it's difficult. US mobile telephone service isn't really setup to work this way. Everybody expects you to sign a contract with a carrier for a certain number of years. Just walking down to some local electronics store and buying a SIM card off the shelf is not at all how things work in the USA. You have to go to carriers to get SIM cards here and those aren't really setup to be pay as you. You can do that sort of thing if you're willing to use crap disposable phones like with Tracfone, but not so much if you actually have a good phone.

I'm assuming that you don't live in the USA either, because your facts are way out of date. I just ordered a couple of new SIMs off of Amazon yesterday to swap out on phones.
Here are a couple of examples.

• AT&T
• T-Mobile
• Straight Talk

If you just buy the cheap $200 Android phone that works perfectly fine as a phone, like the MotoG, then you could spend the remaining $500 and get a DSLR Camera. Not just the camera, but just about everything you need to start taking really good pictures.

I genuinely don't understand why I can't get a power reading from every single light AND socket in the house ... I understand it should cost more to do and it's more complicated but again, 2016!

There is nothing magic about 2016. Yes, I understand, "it's a modern world". But it will cost a lot more to do that, and it will require a lot of smarts to configure this all. How do you manage four things plugged into a power strip? Does each thing report its data, does each socket on the strip report, or do you just monitor the socket in the wall and say that's good enough? How do you tell how much that cable set-top-box is using vs. the TV plugged into the same strip? And then you turn on the lamp plugged into the same strip and ...

So, either you have fine-grained monitoring and a headache managing all the connections and data (which nobody is really going to want to do and nobody is going to want to pay for the ability to not bother doing). Or you monitor at the wall socket level with the headache of managing the data about what is plugged into each one. Or you monitor at the circuit level or house level, which is much easier.

I'm actually kind of glad I'm not well off enough to afford a house, because it would frustrate me to own my own place or build my own place and not be able to easily do that yet.

Oh, you can do it if you want to. You can put these or these all over the place and come up with a wireless mesh data collection network using $3 Arduino Nano knock-offs and a $2 wireless module connected to each. They're all plug-in devices, so you can even do it in the apartment you rent, or in the worst case, your parent's basement (kidding.)

And you are three years late, or one year late, with "it's 2016". Here's one from 2013, and one from 2015.

It will cost more and will be complicated, but yes, it's 2016 and it can be done if you want to do it.

Sorry about the second reply, but it appears you got that idea from some book that Judge Bork wrote saying consolidation is a good thing because, efficiency...

When stuck at one problem it is of no use to focus. Better do something different, so your brain stops going in circles.

Ever had trouble solving a problem, took a break and did something completely different, like take a shower, and *bam* the answer popped into your head while you washed your hair? Left/Right Brain Switch. I am *not* a doctor or scientist, but here's my take on this:

By taking a break and focusing on something else, you are fostering a left to right brain switch. In most people, the Left Brain is dominate and, basically, likes to be in charge. However, it usually tries to solve problems in a linear fashion, using concrete thinking. This doesn't always work. The Right Brain problem solves differently, in a more creative fashion, using more abstract thinking. However, when the Right Brain tries to help out, the Left Brain says, "shut up I'm thinking." Taking a break gives the Left Brain something else to focus on and allows the Right Brain time to work and slip the answer under the Left Brain's door.

For more about general Left/Right Brain stuff, see:

• The Truth About The Left Brain / Right Brain Relationship
• Book: Drawing on the Right Side Brain
• Google: left right brain (switch|shift)

They call it NCR paper. It even comes pre-collated so you don't have to put each color in separate trays.

Yes, because it is being done much more precisely and it takes it much further...

BTW, the selective breeding "naturally" has not been good either, we took that too far as well and now we are missing things that we had just 100 years ago (bananas for example, are all clones, we lost most of them over the past 100 years)

We really haven't lost any of the banana clones that people ever cared about (even "Gros Michel", the one you're probably thinking of). We just can't grow them in huge industrial mono-cultures anymore. The folks living in tropical areas have all sorts of genetically diverse bananas that you never see because they're not suited to international transport. Most bananas are not clones and produce fruit packed with numerous rock-like seeds. Those types aren't that useful to us because of the seeds, but they provide an extremely diverse source of genetics for breeding seedless clonal types (which is easy to do intentionally).

And I assume software RAID?

Correct. AWS uses software raid only. Azure likely does the same.

Yeah and not limited to insecure transmissions to foreign servers, embedded stock passwords and keys too. If you check out his other reviews, he actually outs them on another product. For example:

Morjava®MJ-SmallK Intelligent Smart Wifi Plug Socket Wireless Switch Timer Wifi Socket Wifi Smart US Plug for iPhone iPad Android Smartphone APP
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F...

"The ugly:

Oh this is all pretty terrible. To start: the security on this device is a joke. The communication between the app and the device is encrypted with AES, but the encryption key is the same for all devices and is contained within the app - it's "fdsl;mewrjope456fds4fbvfnjwaugfo". This means that it's easy to decrypt any traffic you can see other people send, and also easy to encrypt your own commands. This isn't too much of a problem on your local network (the majority of smart devices will allow anybody on your wifi to control them), but it's awful when it comes to the cloud interface. By default, anyone in the world can send a command to the plug and it'll just perform it. That means anyone can just turn your plugs on and off, and also set the timer. You can avoid the worst of this by setting a password in the app, but there's no sort of rate limiting on the queries so if someone has identified your plug it won't take too long for them to crack your password.

But wait! There's more!

It runs ssh by default and has a default root password (" p9z34c"), so anyone on your network can log into it and run whatever they want on it. Anyone who can see your network traffic can decrypt the commands and extract the password, so don't use the app on any untrusted networks. It downloads app updates and plug firmware updates over http and doesn't do signature validation, so anyone can man in the middle you and get you to flash backdoored firmware onto your plug."

Needless to say, a big thank you to Mr. Garrett for exposing these issues. This is the kind of thing I might buy on a whim and certainly don't have time to figure out what level of security these things are operating at. He's performing a much needed public service.

I second Kodi (used to be called XBMC).

While I did try it on a raspberry pi, I found it was just too slow. Get an old laptop with HDMI out. Wire it up to your file server and you're ready to rock. I've looked at getting a remote, but I opted instead for a backlit wireless keyboard (with a touchpad on it).
https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod...

Also, if you have those Phillips Hue lights, you can easily get Kodi talking with it; mood lighting with certain kinds of movies is truly amazing.

Evidently.

https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref...

Because of course Amazon stopped selling anyone's USB hubs the day they listed their own.

You really should stop making shit up, Amazon doesn't deny their third party program to people who sell things like what they sell at all.

The pentalobe screws are your warranty sticker.

Right. Because you can only get Pentalobe Drivers and Pentalobe Screws from about 10 sources on Amazon, and also from iFixit, and on eBay, and...

Take a look through the 7,000 Minecraft books on Amazon, a large number of which are novels and not strategy guides. The licensed Minecraft books by Scholastic have 17 million copies in print, and boosted their revenue by 2%. Plus there's the Minecraft: Story Mode game by Telltale that has additional chapters coming after the initial 6 -- though I don't know if that actually means it's selling well or not.

Lies My Teacher Told Me

Loewen gets it right here. I love history, it's one of my degrees, but none of that love came from my primary or secondary schooling. It came from quality works being presented to me by my grandfather when I was young - works that differed from each other profoundly and included the racier details about the past as well.

This language has a pretty good overview of a process that works. Unfortunately his process was invented living in a country, where you are forced to practice it every day. When you are living in a country that doesn't speak whatever language you are trying to learn, the process has to change. The best process I've found so far that works in that situation is to read through a lot of reading material. That gives you a reasonable substitute exposure. I don't think I have a good answer for the best way.

Amazon. Duh. https://fresh.amazon.com/

this is the future and for cars too (...) This would also work for cars and would make electric cars a lot more practical.

There's nothing even remotely practical about a complicated and expensive system to hook up cars to an overhead grid while driving at 50+ mph. Right now they're busy making the cars like the Tesla model 3 but I'm pretty sure that when they get a breather they'll design two forms of trailer range extenders:

a) Huge battery that can do on the road charging
b) Generator trailer that can do on the road charging

And since this would be a custom car accessory with a wired connection it could integrate with cameras/sensors on the trailer and trailer parking assist like VW and Ford among others have. Maybe in two versions, one small with just the battery/charger and one as combined cargo trailer since you can't very well have two. And you could either own one or they'll expand the supercharger stations to be rental pick-ups/drop-offs, recharging them for the next customer.

As far as I know, a Tesla tops out at <1 kW constant draw and there's $200 gas generators that can do that. Now I'm sure you'd need a lot more to make it roadworthy and providing DC and getting permission to do live charging but none of that seems like impossible limitations. And once you have that, hook it up to a 100 galleon fuel tank and there's no range limitation. It's probably more cost efficient to buy a gas powered pickup if you'll do that often, but just for making it work at all that seems by far the easiest way.

Very interesting article. It aligns with testimonies from inside the Iron Curtain. Thanks very much for posting it
"Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism"
https://www.amazon.com/Disinfo...
or in video form
"Yuri Bezmenov: Psychological Warfare Subversion & Control of Western Society"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Former KGB Agent Yuri Bezmenov Explains How to Brainwash a Nation" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The article is certainly shorter than the equivalent in book form
"Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism"
https://www.amazon.com/Disinfo...
or in video form
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Yeah, it might be one of those Micro SD(tm) Crads

It's not even that much cheaper than a real 128GB "crad".

Ah, these Anonymous Cowards...

The only thing that "native" Americans suffered from is uncontrolled immigration and an increase in diversity.

I would suggest that you get some information about that particular genocide. For example, David Cesarani, a Jewish-English historian who specialised in the Holocaust, stated that according to his studies "in terms of the sheer numbers killed, the Native American Genocide exceeds that of the Holocaust".