One of the sheriffs in Illinois is arguing that if the state legalizes pot all the police dogs will have to be put down. Not re-purposed or sent to retire with their handlers (like usually happens when they are no longer able to do their jobs). Euthanized. It's the "Think of the doggos!" approach to keeping pot illegal.
I had a friend whose police dog got sick. The state decided not to treat it and instead put the dog down. The officer didn't have a say. Even if he wanted to pay for the treatment himself, it is not his dog, the dog is the property of the state. The dog got a full honors funeral paid for by the state but the state owns the dog not the officer. Even when the dog gets injured in the line of duty, many times they won't let the dog retire and live out their natural lives for 2 reasons. One is that the handler is an active duty officer and will likely get a new dog. It wouldn't work well for the officer to have 2 dogs even if one was retired. And they also can't put the dog up for adoption because police dogs are also trained to attack and it would be unsafe.
What kind of Corporate Dystopian crap is that? He or his liquidation company owned the bike. They can offer him money to trash it, but they have no say-so on whether it *has* to be destroyed. Not even the local, state, or the feds can do that unless your motorcycle is made out of radioactive materials instead of "glass... and tubes." The government can prevent you from riding it on the streets, but your property rights trump Harley's PR department.
It was already marked as "destroyed". It wasn't supposed to still exist. Someone messed up. It was basically stolen property at that point.
As far as governments requiring you to destroy stuff, they do it all the time. My brother owns a wrecker service and the FDA is the worst. One inspector will let him take home a freezer full of steak and the next inspector will sit out there and watch until every last frozen steak is buried in the ground. Vegetable oil, steaks, frozen foods, you name it, they want it destroyed. And sometimes it's not even food stuff. Sometimes a place like walmart will have a slightly damaged load, get the insurance money, and then require that it all be landfilled because they don't want to sort thru what is good and what is bad and they don't want someone else selling slightly damaged goods with their name on it. Other times, they don't care and we spend a week giving away carloads of stuff to whoever will take it.
Cancer is basically cells that went rogue. You telling me that slicing and dicing DNA (sometimes accidentally in non-target locations) can sometimes cause a cell to not do what it was suppose to? CRISPR is more targetted than say getting hit with a blast of radiation which causes random mutations but you are still changing the programming of a highly complex instruction set written in obfuscated code that we barely understand.
If CRISPR does cause cancer, researchers might be able to use that to find causes and treatments.
We know how to cause cancer. There are lots of chemicals, not to mention radiation that are known carcinogens. More importantly, we know what cancer is. Cancer is a cell that went haywire. Probably the most promising treatment for cancer involves fingerprinting the particular haywire cell you have and training your immune system to attack it directly.
There's plenty of people out there who'd take that risk if they could pay less than full price.
And that's exactly what Amazon says they are doing. They sell it at a reduced price and/or sell it to a liquidator. In some cases though, for a variety of reasons, things have to be destroyed. My dad actually is a liquidator. He buys random stuff from a variety of places. The FDA makes him destroy some stuff. He destroys other stuff because there is too much liability, it's been recalled, it costs too much to ship, it can't be tested, or he can't legally sell it for whatever reason. He once got a Harley and tried to apply for a title for it. Harley called and said that it had to be destroyed to protect their name. I believe they even compensated him for it. It was a perfectly good bike but wasn't up to their standards. My guess is though the most common reason something gets destroyed is because it is cheaper to destroy it than to properly vet it and sell it just like it is cheaper to buy a new dvd player than to pay someone to fix a broken one.
Does your kid's school keep a full classroom set of graphing calculators on hand for tests? (And to the point of the article, do French schools?) A phone ban could work if that is the case.
Some schools do, but most I've seen require kids to buy their own as part of their school supplies at the beginning of the year. I've heard plenty of parents complain over the years especially when they already have calculator A (from another kid/class) but now need calculator B but that's how it's usually done in the USA from what I've seen. Most elementary schools do have some sort of allowance for kids who can't afford to buy their own. In college, you're usually on your own and I saw some kids try to get by with a different model/brand but it usually made the class harder if your calculator didn't match the one the teacher/book used for examples.
Who is to say the printed ballot has no water mark identifying you and your vote? Not that I think it is likely, but is at least possible.
This would be possible even with traditional paper votes, but a little bit harder to execute.
As long as you are not logging into the device, there is no connection between you and the receipt. You just get permission to enter the room, use one of the devices, and deposit a single receipt in the door on your way out. Watermarks and/or serial numbers on paper ballots can interfere with ballot secrecy but you shouldn't have either. This does leave open the chance of box stuffing but that's easy enough to prevent by making sure that the number of registered voters matches the number of electronic entries and the number of receipts.
This is basically how my current county works. They use scantrons so it's paper first but it's basically the same. Paper first does have one advantage that people can still continue to vote even if there is a power failure.
How are proponents of voter-verified paper trails the conspiracy theorists when the other side has the crackpot conspiracy theory that "paper trails pose a risk to ballot secrecy"? I have no problem with electronic voting systems but they all should print a receipt for the voter and that receipt should be deposited in a ballot box before the voter leaves the building which solves both problems nicely. No conspiracy required.
Should graphing calculators also "remain in their locker during school hours"? If not, why should phones used to run a graphing calculator app "remain in their locker during school hours"?
My kids school allows phones but doesn't allow graphic calculator apps to be used on tests and even if they did, all their instructions are for a single model and brand so kids would be on their own. Same with colleges. Colleges aren't going to allow smartphones to be used on tests anytime soon. Kids are still going to be required to buy dedicated graphing calculators. I've heard plenty of parents say that an app would be cheaper but I doubt many schools are going to budge. So yes, in theory, some kids might save a few bucks by allowing them to bring a phone to school but that's doubtful and still not reason enough to allow phones at school. Also, at most schools, they usually have a school issued tablet anyways.
Lol right. Phones cost maybe $100-$1000, do you really think parents would be ok with teachers having an arbitrary confiscation of a $1000 phone that lets the parent talk to their kid? And do you really think teachers want to be responsible for safely storing thousands of dollars of electronics?
This policy has to be clear policy with well understood rules. I am a teacher and I gotta say bravo for France. Cell phone use in class is basically every teacherâ(TM)s pet peeve, and making it federal policy will help the nations schools.
I sent an email just last week giving my kids teachers permission to take away their phone and not be responsible for damages. Our school also implemented a no backpack policy for a while and required them to be left at the office. It's simple enough to require kids to either leave them at home or leave them in their lockers. Lots of schools have lots of policies from no ballcaps, to no guns, to certain dress codes. It would be easy to just say no phones allowed at school. Lots of businesses do that already. My kids school already tells parents not to call or text their kids at school. If they think they need them for the walk home, then requiring them to be in the locker and/or off would work too. Make use of a phone during school hours a one day suspension. How is this so hard? Plenty of places are cellphone free zones. My mom's school won't even allow teachers to have them. If I need to get a hold of her during school day, I have to call the office and use the intercom like they've been doing since the 1970s. And if for some reason you need to keep them on their person, https://www.overyondr.com/ is a low tech solution. I kindof understand why teachers have to put up with the school's policies, but I don't understand why they don't complain to the principal and make a school wide policy. Most schools likely used to have a school wide ban, it's only recently that they have decided for some reason that this is acceptable behavior.
So the RIAA commissioned a study which they hoped to take to the government and convince them to do something to stop this terrible problem. Unfortunately (for the RIAA), the study showed that people who owned cassette decks bought 80% more albums than people who didn't. And the study was shelved and never pursued.
So people who liked music bought more music and were more likely to buy a cassette player to record/play/mix said music. I could have told them that without a study. I know people that buy/download/listen to more music in a year than I have in my entire life. Likewise, I probably watch more movies in a year than my mom has in her entire life.
The point should be, this isn't school rules, this is government mandated LAW....
Is there much difference these days? Schools in most countries have lost most of their autonomy. Even in the USA where we have local school districts with local tax dollars, everything from which books to use to how many days/hours to be in school to what to feed for lunch is dictated by the government.
When I was in school, unauthorized items including electronic games, etc... were confiscated by the individual teachers. If you were lucky, you got it back at the end of the current school day. In other cases, your parent had to come retrieve it for you. I also distinctly remember teachers bringing their box of confiscated stuff out on the last day of school and giving kids back stuff that they had confiscated and held on to for the entire school year.
Even in college, most of my professors had a no cellphone policy. I'm amazed that middle schools allow kids to have phones in class. I know many employers and even a few schools that don't allow employees to have phones. For kids, this seems like a no brainer. Phones should remain in their locker during school hours.
What I don't get is the reference to fiber optic technology. ALL of this could have been done with 1995 technology using merely CCTV and small CCD cameras. Well, maybe. I guess we did have to wait for flatscreens due to weight considerations. But there is no need to go fiber for streaming video to what, about 300 passengers maximum?
Fiber might be useful if you were routing the actual view to each of the virtual windows but this seems like a huge expense for very little gain. If you are going to remove the windows, replacing them with hundreds of fake screens seems pointless. It's still a screen. It would be a lot cheaper to just have the screen in the seatback connected to a half dozen different angles.
Actually the rest of the plane does need windows. In an emergency, flight attendants are supposed to look through them to see whether there's anything wrong with the wings and engines (and more importantly, which one), since the cockpit windows don't extend far enough back to allow that. Cameras are great and all, but they tend to fail in lightning strikes or when the plane has issues with electrical power.
A few windows might be useful for backup but the vast majority are for passenger comfort. Look at military planes. Even the ones that haul soldiers only have a handful of windows. You could easily eliminate 80%+ of the windows without affecting the visibility of the flight attendant. This would probably actually make the plane safer as windows are a common cause of depressurization. That being said, passenger comfort is kindof a big deal and screens are a poor imitation.
All you can do is not answer the phone, forcing the caller to leave a message (which a robocaller will often do, filling up space on your voice mail and taking up just as much time to purge it as it would to answer the phone and hang up), whereas plenty of human callers may end up not leaving a message at all because of a preference for full duplex communication.
There is an easy solution to this. Turn off your voicemail and have a message saying to send you a text. This eliminates most spammers and prevents you from having to spend time trying to decipher a voicemail. It's faster to read a text than listen to a voicemail and it has the added advantage that texting laws are much more strict so spammers are less likely text you and there is more recourse if they do.
No worries, with current copyright laws, they have at least 95 years. And that's assuming Disney/Star Wars doesn't extend it again. You have to appreciate the strange irony of calling a movie a failure if it's not profitable within a week of release yet having copyright laws that extend for many thousands of times longer than that.
We should change copyright laws to a max of 20 years or 5 years after profitability, whichever is shorter.
The databases can't exist without the patronage of the phone company, so the phone company has a lot of power.
Not only this but the database is mostly obsolete. I haven't had a cell phone that used the callerid database for probably 10 years. It shows the name if they are in my contactlist but not the name of people not in my cellphone's local contactlist. I'm assuming callerid might still be used for landlines but who has landlines these days? Everybody I know uses cellphones for personal and voip/pbx for businesses.
It's too costly and slows down business transactions to do a full background check and audit trail to vet out all the spammers. Imagine it takes a month to get residential telephone or cell phone. Plus the total number of spammers is a really really small number compared to the legitimate customers signing up. This small percentage makes all those calls.
It might be a small percentage making the calls but it's approaching 85% of the calls I receive and most of my friends receive. I would be willing to pay the $25 and wait the 30 days to get a phone if it meant that it reduced the number of phone calls I received by 85%.
Another possible option if the phone company is just too archaic is to implement 2FA. If I could sign up for a service where everyone who calls me has to type a code received by text, I would sign up tomorrow. You have a spoofed number, you don't receive the text and you can't get thru. Calling from a landline or voip that can't receive texts, too bad, call me from your verified cell phone or contact me in another way. Most legitimate businesses don't actually call you anymore anyways. Most of my legitimate calls are from other cell phones.
Solar and wind are already the cheapest, and are STILL falling in price. Nuclear, however...
Solar and wind are nowhere close to the bottom for oil. Solar and wind are cheaper just because the demand for oil is high. If the demand drops like this article predicts, then price will also continue to drop. Some of the cheapest oil can still be extracted for under $10 a barrel. Solar and wind have a long ways to go before they can compete with $10 oil. We will likely stay in an equilibrium for a long time to come and as solar and wind drop, the price of oil drops with it. This does mean that the more expensive oils start dropping offline and the supply gets smaller, and the price goes back up, etc, etc... until the price of solar/wind drops below the price of the cheapest oil.
Cooking, laundry, housekeeping, lawn care, child care, etc.. are not able to be automated at all
Laundry has already been automated: washing machine and dryer have cut down the time we need to spend on laundry by 95%.
Lawn care and vacuum cleaning: you can buy robots for that today. And their cost is not that much higher than the cost of a manual lawnmower/vacuum cleaner.
Sure, the washing portion of laundry has been automated but not the folding nor the putting away. Likewise, you can buy a roomba that cuts the vacuuming down but that's really a minor part of the overall cleaning of a house. Many people go weeks between vacuums while cleaning the kitchen is a daily task. And although roomba like lawn mowers might exist they are not at all common nor are they safe to leave unattended.
Have a system of loosely connected platforms where one person can choose platform A and another person can choose platform B and they can still talk to each other.
Yes, this is why Linux totally destroyed Windows and OSX on the desktop. People don't want to choose between A and B. Sure IT pros liked being able to choose (and car guys like swapping out things under their hoods), but most people want to pick up something and have it just work.
Android has 85% market share. For any single phone iphone wins hands down but the shear number of choices of android allows it to dominate the total market. People want things to just work but they also want the choice. Android offers a range of sizes, prices, and features. Likewise with email, there isn't one client that dominates the market. People find the email client that they like. Go look at the toothpaste or shampoo aisle. Sure people might be overwhelmed with choices some time but it's simple not true that they don't like the flexibility to chose an alternative.
The answer today is zero, because that's how many customers you're likely going to have once the masses have been deemed unemployable by the robot workforce.
Try not to gleam over the facts regarding supply and demand next time. It'll be easier to accept the chaos you want to call "progress".
We are nowhere close to getting rid of manual labor. We might be starting to move back to the plantation world (which still exists in much of the world) where you have the rich with multiple household helpers but we are nowhere close to being able to automate anything in the home. Cooking, laundry, housekeeping, lawn care, child care, etc.. are not able to be automated at all. Even amazon, as this article points out, has to have someone there to babysit the machines because the machines can't deal with slight changes.
Also, unemployment is still amazingly low. The official numbers is at or below the theoretical lowest it can go (based on churn). There are some problems with people giving up looking and therefore not being counted or being underemployed but there are plenty of jobs to go around. The problem isn't the lack of jobs but rather the lack of good paying jobs for many people. We aren't going to have massive unemployment anytime soon. The biggest threat is probably self driving cars but if you look at the news lately, that's mostly just smoke and mirrors and is still likely decades away and will likely take a fundamentally different approach and probably a breakthru or two in order to replace all the drivers currently employed.
A distributed Facebook is basically a fancy RSS feed - each user hosts their own profile on their own host. There is no need for advertising, and people who are pushing advertising into their feed for others to see can be unfollowed for the social menace they are.
Back in the real world, the average non-geek is never going to "host their own profile on their own host" and without advertising or some other form of revenue, there is no way for a startup to compete with the cash cow that is facebook.
Additionally, people don't really care. Geek care, that's mostly it. Most everyone else doesn't care, and that matters, because if they don't come to this utopia of distributed privacy, then no one else will either.
People don't care about privacy but they are willing to switch for features. A distributed system like email or even android allows multiple products to exist in the same domain. That will be the only way to defeat the walled garden. Have a system of loosely connected platforms where one person can choose platform A and another person can choose platform B and they can still talk to each other.
Facebook is unlikely to do this voluntarily and it would be unlikely for a startup to be able to manage this either. The most likely scenerio at this point would be if google opened google+ to third party developers as a way to try to one up facebook.
1. Copying features. Great, this means we get more features. It also shows the futility of patents and copyright. These things only serve the established and dominant corporations because it raises the barrier to entry.
Although I agree that patents and copyrights do tilt heavily in favor of the established companies, completely removing them would be worse. It would allow a book publisher to immediately make copies of your new book without giving you royalties. It would allow facebook, google, etc... to copy mmediately with no recourse. At least currently they have to be somewhat creative to copy a feature and can't blatantly steal it.
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One of the sheriffs in Illinois is arguing that if the state legalizes pot all the police dogs will have to be put down. Not re-purposed or sent to retire with their handlers (like usually happens when they are no longer able to do their jobs). Euthanized. It's the "Think of the doggos!" approach to keeping pot illegal.
I had a friend whose police dog got sick. The state decided not to treat it and instead put the dog down. The officer didn't have a say. Even if he wanted to pay for the treatment himself, it is not his dog, the dog is the property of the state. The dog got a full honors funeral paid for by the state but the state owns the dog not the officer. Even when the dog gets injured in the line of duty, many times they won't let the dog retire and live out their natural lives for 2 reasons. One is that the handler is an active duty officer and will likely get a new dog. It wouldn't work well for the officer to have 2 dogs even if one was retired. And they also can't put the dog up for adoption because police dogs are also trained to attack and it would be unsafe.
What kind of Corporate Dystopian crap is that? He or his liquidation company owned the bike. They can offer him money to trash it, but they have no say-so on whether it *has* to be destroyed. Not even the local, state, or the feds can do that unless your motorcycle is made out of radioactive materials instead of "glass... and tubes." The government can prevent you from riding it on the streets, but your property rights trump Harley's PR department.
It was already marked as "destroyed". It wasn't supposed to still exist. Someone messed up. It was basically stolen property at that point.
As far as governments requiring you to destroy stuff, they do it all the time. My brother owns a wrecker service and the FDA is the worst. One inspector will let him take home a freezer full of steak and the next inspector will sit out there and watch until every last frozen steak is buried in the ground. Vegetable oil, steaks, frozen foods, you name it, they want it destroyed. And sometimes it's not even food stuff. Sometimes a place like walmart will have a slightly damaged load, get the insurance money, and then require that it all be landfilled because they don't want to sort thru what is good and what is bad and they don't want someone else selling slightly damaged goods with their name on it. Other times, they don't care and we spend a week giving away carloads of stuff to whoever will take it.
Cancer is basically cells that went rogue. You telling me that slicing and dicing DNA (sometimes accidentally in non-target locations) can sometimes cause a cell to not do what it was suppose to? CRISPR is more targetted than say getting hit with a blast of radiation which causes random mutations but you are still changing the programming of a highly complex instruction set written in obfuscated code that we barely understand.
If CRISPR does cause cancer, researchers might be able to use that to find causes and treatments.
We know how to cause cancer. There are lots of chemicals, not to mention radiation that are known carcinogens. More importantly, we know what cancer is. Cancer is a cell that went haywire. Probably the most promising treatment for cancer involves fingerprinting the particular haywire cell you have and training your immune system to attack it directly.
Does it have to be destroyed on the off-chance?
There's plenty of people out there who'd take that risk if they could pay less than full price.
And that's exactly what Amazon says they are doing. They sell it at a reduced price and/or sell it to a liquidator. In some cases though, for a variety of reasons, things have to be destroyed. My dad actually is a liquidator. He buys random stuff from a variety of places. The FDA makes him destroy some stuff. He destroys other stuff because there is too much liability, it's been recalled, it costs too much to ship, it can't be tested, or he can't legally sell it for whatever reason. He once got a Harley and tried to apply for a title for it. Harley called and said that it had to be destroyed to protect their name. I believe they even compensated him for it. It was a perfectly good bike but wasn't up to their standards. My guess is though the most common reason something gets destroyed is because it is cheaper to destroy it than to properly vet it and sell it just like it is cheaper to buy a new dvd player than to pay someone to fix a broken one.
Does your kid's school keep a full classroom set of graphing calculators on hand for tests? (And to the point of the article, do French schools?) A phone ban could work if that is the case.
Some schools do, but most I've seen require kids to buy their own as part of their school supplies at the beginning of the year. I've heard plenty of parents complain over the years especially when they already have calculator A (from another kid/class) but now need calculator B but that's how it's usually done in the USA from what I've seen. Most elementary schools do have some sort of allowance for kids who can't afford to buy their own. In college, you're usually on your own and I saw some kids try to get by with a different model/brand but it usually made the class harder if your calculator didn't match the one the teacher/book used for examples.
Who is to say the printed ballot has no water mark identifying you and your vote? Not that I think it is likely, but is at least possible.
This would be possible even with traditional paper votes, but a little bit harder to execute.
As long as you are not logging into the device, there is no connection between you and the receipt. You just get permission to enter the room, use one of the devices, and deposit a single receipt in the door on your way out. Watermarks and/or serial numbers on paper ballots can interfere with ballot secrecy but you shouldn't have either. This does leave open the chance of box stuffing but that's easy enough to prevent by making sure that the number of registered voters matches the number of electronic entries and the number of receipts.
This is basically how my current county works. They use scantrons so it's paper first but it's basically the same. Paper first does have one advantage that people can still continue to vote even if there is a power failure.
How are proponents of voter-verified paper trails the conspiracy theorists when the other side has
the crackpot conspiracy theory that "paper trails pose a risk to ballot secrecy"?
I have no problem with electronic voting systems but they all should print a receipt for the voter
and that receipt should be deposited in a ballot box before the voter leaves the building
which solves both problems nicely. No conspiracy required.
Should graphing calculators also "remain in their locker during school hours"? If not, why should phones used to run a graphing calculator app "remain in their locker during school hours"?
My kids school allows phones but doesn't allow graphic calculator apps to be used on tests and even if they did, all their instructions are for a single model and brand so kids would be on their own. Same with colleges. Colleges aren't going to allow smartphones to be used on tests anytime soon. Kids are still going to be required to buy dedicated graphing calculators. I've heard plenty of parents say that an app would be cheaper but I doubt many schools are going to budge. So yes, in theory, some kids might save a few bucks by allowing them to bring a phone to school but that's doubtful and still not reason enough to allow phones at school. Also, at most schools, they usually have a school issued tablet anyways.
Lol right. Phones cost maybe $100-$1000, do you really think parents would be ok with teachers having an arbitrary confiscation of a $1000 phone that lets the parent talk to their kid? And do you really think teachers want to be responsible for safely storing thousands of dollars of electronics?
This policy has to be clear policy with well understood rules. I am a teacher and I gotta say bravo for France. Cell phone use in class is basically every teacherâ(TM)s pet peeve, and making it federal policy will help the nations schools.
I sent an email just last week giving my kids teachers permission to take away their phone and not be responsible for damages. Our school also implemented a no backpack policy for a while and required them to be left at the office. It's simple enough to require kids to either leave them at home or leave them in their lockers. Lots of schools have lots of policies from no ballcaps, to no guns, to certain dress codes. It would be easy to just say no phones allowed at school. Lots of businesses do that already. My kids school already tells parents not to call or text their kids at school. If they think they need them for the walk home, then requiring them to be in the locker and/or off would work too. Make use of a phone during school hours a one day suspension. How is this so hard? Plenty of places are cellphone free zones. My mom's school won't even allow teachers to have them. If I need to get a hold of her during school day, I have to call the office and use the intercom like they've been doing since the 1970s. And if for some reason you need to keep them on their person, https://www.overyondr.com/ is a low tech solution. I kindof understand why teachers have to put up with the school's policies, but I don't understand why they don't complain to the principal and make a school wide policy. Most schools likely used to have a school wide ban, it's only recently that they have decided for some reason that this is acceptable behavior.
So the RIAA commissioned a study which they hoped to take to the government and convince them to do something to stop this terrible problem. Unfortunately (for the RIAA), the study showed that people who owned cassette decks bought 80% more albums than people who didn't. And the study was shelved and never pursued.
So people who liked music bought more music and were more likely to buy a cassette player to record/play/mix said music. I could have told them that without a study. I know people that buy/download/listen to more music in a year than I have in my entire life. Likewise, I probably watch more movies in a year than my mom has in her entire life.
The point should be, this isn't school rules, this is government mandated LAW....
Is there much difference these days? Schools in most countries have lost most of their autonomy. Even in the USA where we have local school districts with local tax dollars, everything from which books to use to how many days/hours to be in school to what to feed for lunch is dictated by the government.
When I was in school, unauthorized items including electronic games, etc... were confiscated by the individual teachers. If you were lucky, you got it back at the end of the current school day. In other cases, your parent had to come retrieve it for you. I also distinctly remember teachers bringing their box of confiscated stuff out on the last day of school and giving kids back stuff that they had confiscated and held on to for the entire school year.
Even in college, most of my professors had a no cellphone policy. I'm amazed that middle schools allow kids to have phones in class. I know many employers and even a few schools that don't allow employees to have phones. For kids, this seems like a no brainer. Phones should remain in their locker during school hours.
What I don't get is the reference to fiber optic technology. ALL of this could have been done with 1995 technology using merely CCTV and small CCD cameras. Well, maybe. I guess we did have to wait for flatscreens due to weight considerations. But there is no need to go fiber for streaming video to what, about 300 passengers maximum?
Fiber might be useful if you were routing the actual view to each of the virtual windows but this seems like a huge expense for very little gain. If you are going to remove the windows, replacing them with hundreds of fake screens seems pointless. It's still a screen. It would be a lot cheaper to just have the screen in the seatback connected to a half dozen different angles.
Actually the rest of the plane does need windows. In an emergency, flight attendants are supposed to look through them to see whether there's anything wrong with the wings and engines (and more importantly, which one), since the cockpit windows don't extend far enough back to allow that. Cameras are great and all, but they tend to fail in lightning strikes or when the plane has issues with electrical power.
A few windows might be useful for backup but the vast majority are for passenger comfort. Look at military planes. Even the ones that haul soldiers only have a handful of windows. You could easily eliminate 80%+ of the windows without affecting the visibility of the flight attendant. This would probably actually make the plane safer as windows are a common cause of depressurization. That being said, passenger comfort is kindof a big deal and screens are a poor imitation.
All you can do is not answer the phone, forcing the caller to leave a message (which a robocaller will often do, filling up space on your voice mail and taking up just as much time to purge it as it would to answer the phone and hang up), whereas plenty of human callers may end up not leaving a message at all because of a preference for full duplex communication.
There is an easy solution to this. Turn off your voicemail and have a message saying to send you a text. This eliminates most spammers and prevents you from having to spend time trying to decipher a voicemail. It's faster to read a text than listen to a voicemail and it has the added advantage that texting laws are much more strict so spammers are less likely text you and there is more recourse if they do.
gonna take a long time for 250 million+ loss
No worries, with current copyright laws, they have at least 95 years. And that's assuming Disney/Star Wars doesn't extend it again.
You have to appreciate the strange irony of calling a movie a failure if it's not profitable within a week of release yet having copyright laws that extend for many thousands of times longer than that.
We should change copyright laws to a max of 20 years or 5 years after profitability, whichever is shorter.
The databases can't exist without the patronage of the phone company, so the phone company has a lot of power.
Not only this but the database is mostly obsolete. I haven't had a cell phone that used the callerid database for probably 10 years. It shows the name if they are in my contactlist but not the name of people not in my cellphone's local contactlist. I'm assuming callerid might still be used for landlines but who has landlines these days? Everybody I know uses cellphones for personal and voip/pbx for businesses.
It's too costly and slows down business transactions to do a full background check and audit trail to vet out all the spammers. Imagine it takes a month to get residential telephone or cell phone. Plus the total number of spammers is a really really small number compared to the legitimate customers signing up. This small percentage makes all those calls.
It might be a small percentage making the calls but it's approaching 85% of the calls I receive and most of my friends receive. I would be willing to pay the $25 and wait the 30 days to get a phone if it meant that it reduced the number of phone calls I received by 85%.
Another possible option if the phone company is just too archaic is to implement 2FA. If I could sign up for a service where everyone who calls me has to type a code received by text, I would sign up tomorrow. You have a spoofed number, you don't receive the text and you can't get thru. Calling from a landline or voip that can't receive texts, too bad, call me from your verified cell phone or contact me in another way. Most legitimate businesses don't actually call you anymore anyways. Most of my legitimate calls are from other cell phones.
>when oil gets too expensive
Solar and wind are already the cheapest, and are STILL falling in price. Nuclear, however ...
Solar and wind are nowhere close to the bottom for oil. Solar and wind are cheaper just because the demand for oil is high. If the demand drops like this article predicts, then price will also continue to drop. Some of the cheapest oil can still be extracted for under $10 a barrel. Solar and wind have a long ways to go before they can compete with $10 oil. We will likely stay in an equilibrium for a long time to come and as solar and wind drop, the price of oil drops with it. This does mean that the more expensive oils start dropping offline and the supply gets smaller, and the price goes back up, etc, etc... until the price of solar/wind drops below the price of the cheapest oil.
Cooking, laundry, housekeeping, lawn care, child care, etc.. are not able to be automated at all
Laundry has already been automated: washing machine and dryer have cut down the time we need to spend on laundry by 95%.
Lawn care and vacuum cleaning: you can buy robots for that today. And their cost is not that much higher than the cost of a manual lawnmower/vacuum cleaner.
Sure, the washing portion of laundry has been automated but not the folding nor the putting away.
Likewise, you can buy a roomba that cuts the vacuuming down but that's really a minor part of the overall cleaning of a house.
Many people go weeks between vacuums while cleaning the kitchen is a daily task.
And although roomba like lawn mowers might exist they are not at all common nor are they safe to leave unattended.
Yes, this is why Linux totally destroyed Windows and OSX on the desktop. People don't want to choose between A and B. Sure IT pros liked being able to choose (and car guys like swapping out things under their hoods), but most people want to pick up something and have it just work.
Android has 85% market share. For any single phone iphone wins hands down but the shear number of choices of android allows it to dominate the total market. People want things to just work but they also want the choice. Android offers a range of sizes, prices, and features. Likewise with email, there isn't one client that dominates the market. People find the email client that they like. Go look at the toothpaste or shampoo aisle. Sure people might be overwhelmed with choices some time but it's simple not true that they don't like the flexibility to chose an alternative.
Wrong.
The answer today is zero, because that's how many customers you're likely going to have once the masses have been deemed unemployable by the robot workforce.
Try not to gleam over the facts regarding supply and demand next time. It'll be easier to accept the chaos you want to call "progress".
We are nowhere close to getting rid of manual labor. We might be starting to move back to the plantation world (which still exists in much of the world) where you have the rich with multiple household helpers but we are nowhere close to being able to automate anything in the home. Cooking, laundry, housekeeping, lawn care, child care, etc.. are not able to be automated at all. Even amazon, as this article points out, has to have someone there to babysit the machines because the machines can't deal with slight changes.
Also, unemployment is still amazingly low. The official numbers is at or below the theoretical lowest it can go (based on churn). There are some problems with people giving up looking and therefore not being counted or being underemployed but there are plenty of jobs to go around. The problem isn't the lack of jobs but rather the lack of good paying jobs for many people. We aren't going to have massive unemployment anytime soon. The biggest threat is probably self driving cars but if you look at the news lately, that's mostly just smoke and mirrors and is still likely decades away and will likely take a fundamentally different approach and probably a breakthru or two in order to replace all the drivers currently employed.
A distributed Facebook is basically a fancy RSS feed - each user hosts their own profile on their own host. There is no need for advertising, and people who are pushing advertising into their feed for others to see can be unfollowed for the social menace they are.
Back in the real world, the average non-geek is never going to "host their own profile on their own host" and without advertising or some other form of revenue, there is no way for a startup to compete with the cash cow that is facebook.
Additionally, people don't really care. Geek care, that's mostly it. Most everyone else doesn't care, and that matters, because if they don't come to this utopia of distributed privacy, then no one else will either.
People don't care about privacy but they are willing to switch for features. A distributed system like email or even android allows multiple products to exist in the same domain. That will be the only way to defeat the walled garden. Have a system of loosely connected platforms where one person can choose platform A and another person can choose platform B and they can still talk to each other.
Facebook is unlikely to do this voluntarily and it would be unlikely for a startup to be able to manage this either. The most likely scenerio at this point would be if google opened google+ to third party developers as a way to try to one up facebook.
1. Copying features.
Great, this means we get more features.
It also shows the futility of patents and copyright.
These things only serve the established and dominant corporations because it raises the barrier to entry.
Although I agree that patents and copyrights do tilt heavily in favor of the established companies, completely removing them would be worse. It would allow a book publisher to immediately make copies of your new book without giving you royalties. It would allow facebook, google, etc... to copy mmediately with no recourse. At least currently they have to be somewhat creative to copy a feature and can't blatantly steal it.