You'd be surprised at how low the resolution of the sensors is. What do you think it is?
I honestly have no idea, which is why I'm asking. In my experience with just poking touchscreens, it's always high enough (or well enough hidden behind clever software) that I don't encounter the 'no, damn it, I pressed over here, not over there!' effect (except with ATMs, because those have so much glass between the touch layer and the actual screen, so they are highly sensitive to parallax effects); but, because the intended use case is finger-as-stylus, I've never had occasion to test sub-fingertip levels of accuracy.
Of course we all know this will be biased. Piracy funds terrorism, illegal drugs, crime and violence.
Have they made any adjustments to the party line to deal with the fact that the economics of buying dodgy DVDs from some bloke down the pub and just torrenting everything are really quite dissimilar (and, indeed, likely direct rivals)?
It isn't rocket surgery to suspect, or even find the occasional confirmation in stories about some arrest, that people who deal in commodities that command a markup because they incur legal exposure will also deal in illicit media copies, since those are a commodity that commands a markup because it incurs legal exposure; but that flavor of skeezy vendor is probably the first against the wall when the ubiquitous online piracy starts up, since they offer none of the benefits of licit vendors and still cost considerably more than just downloading stuff.
Surely they have some heartbreaking story about the destruction of American Jobs and whatnot that covers the latter case?
Given that capacitive touchscreens are typically intended to be used with input devices (fingers or those ghastly little rubber stylus-things) that deform under pressure, is there something stopping you from computing approximate pressure by examining the size of the area of contact across the duration of the touch? A light touch would presumably be of nearly constant size, with little or no deformation of the user's finger, a heavy touch would have substantially greater surface area at its peak (when the user's finger is deformed against the rigid glass) than during the beginning or end of the touch.
Are current capacitive touchscreens not high resolution enough for that? Not a high enough refresh rate? Human-meat too unpredictable in deform-ability between subjects?
It seems to be a mixture of 'pointless novelty for its own sake' and 'human legs are roughly cylindrical, so slightly curved objects fit better in pockets that would otherwise be a bit small'.
The driver has admitted to driving the car after an accident, ignoring all warnings until told that the car had a problem so big that it was going to stop ( on fire).
I would be interested in seeing the insurance companies response this this...
Unless Team Insurance can send somebody out and prove that the battery pack would have avoided thermal cascade if the driver had immediately stopped the engine (and that doing so is the driver's responsibility, in response to those error codes, rather than Tesla's responsibility to have the battery shut down harder, earlier), it probably won't help them much.
Discharging a battery excessively quickly can start the fire (especially if one of the cells was dodgy); but once one gets going, it doesn't much matter whether you stop the discharge or not, it'll burn.
What I'd be curious to know; but don't really have a good guess 'by intuition' about, is how fast a moving car whose gas tank is punctured 'sheds' fuel (thus reducing the amount of fuel left to roast the occupants alive) by virtue of being relatively thinly protected and close to the bottom-rear of the car.
Moving it closer to the core of the vehicle would reduce the risk of puncture; but it would probably reduce the speed of drainage in the event of a puncture, and make it more likely that some or all of the spilled fuel will end up sloshing around various nooks and crannies of the car, instead of spilling into the road.
This obviously isn't an option with batteries, which are solid and not going anywhere; but with a liquid fuel, are you safer if catastrophic incidents bleed as much fuel as possible, as fast as possible? Or if the tank resists leakage as much as possible?
The man has some seriously low expectations of a car.
For better or worse, by the standards of 'devices with more than a thousand pounds of Li-ion batteries right underneath the operator', responding to a massive puncture wound with a series of error messages and a controlled shutdown is pretty damn polite...
This doesn't necessarily mean you want to be the lucky driver of one; but I'm impressed that the system held off the worst of the failure cascade long enough for him to make it out alive, rather than just burning him into a grease spot and some mixed oxides right then and there. (I had the pleasure of one of Sony's defective battery packs back in the day, and after having to toss it, and the attached computer, off my lap in a hurry, I've never taken the term 'laptop' quite as literally. Those things go pretty fast, once they start.)
Not much of a problem when you're dealing with an MMO-type game that requires you to be online anyway. Not more of a problem than the game-server being down, anyway.
The bigger problem will be getting game developers to take on the challenge (and risk, if it means that they can only sell their game to people who are paying extra for Xbox Live Platinum Cloud Physics Foundation Edition Home Ultimate) of creating a type of game that, like the MMO, is only possible in the context of this remote capability, rather than having the remote capability be an obvious cash grab/lockin attempt. Think of how much people liked the 'online' features of SimCity's recent reboot... It was obvious to all that it's value was close to zero to them, and its costs were substantially greater, and lo, great was their wrath.
In the hypothetical case of the game that could only be realized with 'Flare', people will grumble; but put up with it. If it's transparent to all that you need a monthly subscription and a fast broadband connection just so that the "generic glass fragments flying outward" effect that the art guy spent all day tweaking to look exactly like it does in the movies can be removed and replaced by a realtime finite element analysis of the window and computational fluid dynamics simulations of the trajectories taken by each glass fragment (totally different on the maps with higher atmospheric pressure, worth it!) in real time? That's a tech demo, not a feature.
The other issue with latency is that 'gaming' is something with pretty spiky demand over time. Evenings and weekends? The system will be hammered. During school hours and the workday? Demand minimal and largely impecunious. Holidays and vacation periods? Almost certain to be a peak large enough to provide lots of angry ranting customers (and at a time when lots and lots of other people are putzing around online, reading people's angry opinions and possibly making shopping decisions. Enjoy!).
Unless they can find some off-peak customer who will buy whatever computational capability they are selling (and this could get tricky, since Nvidia and friends tend to price hardware and enable/disable capabilities specifically to discourage cost insensitive 'pro' users from buying cheapy gamer gear rather than expensive workstation gear, so 'Flare' might have some trouble finding a crossover market), they'll be idling a hell of a lot of expensive chips, that aren't getting any better with age, for most of the day, then running into capacity crunches at peak times. That will be miserable.
There might be some feature (I can't think of a killer app offhand; but I'm not excluding the possibility) that would make it worth it, because it simply couldn't be done otherwise (everybody knows that MMORPGs are priced and on a lease in a way that single player or party-level multiplayer RPGs aren't; but you can't really get the 'MMO' in 'MMORPG' any other way, and people seem willing to trade that off); but this will be a hard sell indeed if it mostly just gets used for tech demos and incremental increases in ambient prettiness.
Even on the PC side, which tends to be a bit more willing to spend cash on hardware, the number of gamers who actually own screaming top-of-range systems is pretty small compared to the number of people who buy something good enough and call it a day. Consoles appear to be much more cost sensitive. And, while already having somebody on the hook for XBL or whatever makes billing easier, it doesn't necessarily give you much headroom to increase the price to pay for those extra server resources.
Especially given how good developers have gotten at cheating and fudging on computationally-intractable physics and graphics problems (and, as in the tragic case of more than a few games' 'ragdoll' body-physics systems, how unnatural attempts at 'real' physics can look, with twitch glitches, clipping and contorting, etc. compared to a totally faked; but artfully canned, animation) any use of this system is going to have to be rather creative to be more than incrementally better than far less computationally (and financially, if the game sells a reasonable number of units) expensive faking.
Surely colo security won't suspect a thing if I bolt rack ears onto my sleeping bag (It's, an, um, nearline hot-spare storage appliance...) and scrawl "Coolant" in sharpie on my 2 liter of Mt. Dew?
This might be your objective; but you do realize just how dire the process of getting congress into motion every time a reevaluation of atmospheric particulate emissions is in order, or the question of whether the northwestern arboreal octopus is 'endangered' or 'threatened' comes up, would be?
True enough, they even built their own domain specific C extension for the purpose of evaluating very large datasets (it's called 'Hancock' if you want to go googling yourself).
However, if I've learned anything about the world from software, it's that the fact that the work has already been done is absolutely no obstacle to charging each customer for doing the work...
I had no idea AT&T was such a cheap date. I would have assumed that the 10 million might cover the fee for transferring all those heavy packets through the tubes to NSA HQ, with the data and analysis itself ringing in at at least a factor of ten greater.
Also, given that AT&T has slightly over 100 million wireless customers, never mind all the Ma Bell copper customers, apparently the volume discounts on customer information are pretty good...
The comparison to laptops brings to mind one rather galling issue with the 'BYOD/embracing consumer technology/user-demand-driven/etc.' stuff:
The bottom-feeder laptop slingers are in a bind; because people really do care about price, and they listened; but now they've put out enough shoddy stuff that, for the most part, nobody trusts any unique quality or feature claims that they make(not enough to pay much extra, at least), and so they have to keep squeezing the BoM even harder than the other guy. Only a player who can assert superiority that people will pay extra for has the room to simply refuse to offer cut-down products and only build stuff that you'll have to pay extra for.
With the consumer services side, it's heavily driven by ease-of-use and price. Is it free? Great. Can I clicky-click in with my facebook account credentials? Wonderful. Is it automagic? Hooray.
Sometimes such products simply are superior; but others they are easier to use mostly because they ignore stodgy 'enterprise' requirements that nobody likes dealing with.You think your IT department likes being Officer Hardass about document retention, or not fucking around with HIPAA-covered data? Hardly. Is it their job to tell you that No. You. Cannot. Put. Medical. Records. On. Dropbox. I. Don't. Care. About. iPad. Support? Unfortunately, sometimes it is(and if they were your medical records, you'd want it to be.)
Some do better than others; but it isn't uncommon to find that a service that grew up in consumer land, and still does most of its business there, has spent so much time chasing and polishing what people actually want (cheap, easy) that they either simply cannot sell you the additional features you need, or there are nightmarish integration issues (Why would you want the ability to authenticate against an LDAP server? Every single user can just create a new username and password with us!)
Inertia helps, as does vendor lock in; but some consumer services are treated like cheap, shiny, toys because they are.
I suspect that this scheme is also approximately as ADA (and I assume the EU has an equivalent, it's the sort of thing that they would do) compliant as prior CAPCHAs, which is more or less 'HAHA, ocular cripple, no website for you!', possibly with an audio variant that is either broken and simply not actually a substitute, clear enough to be within attack range of commercially available text-to-speech software, or something allegedly human; but about as comprehensible as a heavy metal vocalist screaming a language you don't know through a couple of tin cans and a piece of string, from underwater...
I'm not sure how more sites don't get smacked for that.
Oh, I don't mean to imply that it's one-sided, that's part of why it works so well. While dramatic (and sometimes fun for its own sake) having to use brute force to compel obedience is relatively expensive and unreliable. It may be a sign of strength; but it's also a sign of incompetence.
The power of the consumer-driven surveillance system is that, at the same time as it provides amazing amounts of information, it is largely seen as non-oppressive, even a collection of features worth paying for. And, unless you just like strutting around like Herr Commandant, a set of mechanisms that is both powerful and has lots of fun gizmos is far superior to one that requires lots of cracking down.
It might actually be worse, since the scheme describes providing a list of descriptions to choose from, one of which is the one that the user originally provided when the inkblot was generated.
Any CAPTCHA-style scheme that has to rely on a list of options (either because the cues are too vague, or because the answers aren't trivially expressible with a mouse and keyboard(or, now, a touchscreen...) inherently runs into the issue that even a bot of essentially zero skill can now achieve a 1/n success rate, for an n length list of options; by pure chance. Unless you want to piss off your users a lot, 1/n is probably actually going to be unnervingly good starting odds, for a trivial scraper-level bot, and the options list also means that any more sophisticated AI approach has a relatively small and discrete universe of possibilities to deal with.
Big Brother is here, and he's a Capitalist Tyrant.
Isn't it terribly inconvenient how market research data, which is so commercially useful that companies collect it out of self interest, technological transaction data, which are necessary to do things like route packets, packages, and phone calls, and the data that would be of interest to a surveillance state are so very similar?
That's really why capitalism has such a bright future as a surveillance dystopia. Anybody with enough cash can hire thugs and informants; but can your commie, or your fascist, operate a comprehensive network of informants at a profit, rather than as a massive drain on the consumer economy that might keep the mobs at bay? Anyone with enough thugs and informants can make tracking collars mandatory; but can they make wearers lovingly recharge them nightly, and pay for customized ringtones?
Could even Big Brother get Winston to rack up some credit card debt to finance a 50" HD telescreen, out of a desire to consume premium content in greater comfort and luxury than his lesser neighbors? Bah. Amateurs, the lot of them.
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Is it ever politically inconvenient to have a wicked foreign enemy, close enough to be viscerally insulting, distant enough to not be a real problem?
You'd be surprised at how low the resolution of the sensors is. What do you think it is?
I honestly have no idea, which is why I'm asking. In my experience with just poking touchscreens, it's always high enough (or well enough hidden behind clever software) that I don't encounter the 'no, damn it, I pressed over here, not over there!' effect (except with ATMs, because those have so much glass between the touch layer and the actual screen, so they are highly sensitive to parallax effects); but, because the intended use case is finger-as-stylus, I've never had occasion to test sub-fingertip levels of accuracy.
Of course we all know this will be biased. Piracy funds terrorism, illegal drugs, crime and violence.
Have they made any adjustments to the party line to deal with the fact that the economics of buying dodgy DVDs from some bloke down the pub and just torrenting everything are really quite dissimilar (and, indeed, likely direct rivals)?
It isn't rocket surgery to suspect, or even find the occasional confirmation in stories about some arrest, that people who deal in commodities that command a markup because they incur legal exposure will also deal in illicit media copies, since those are a commodity that commands a markup because it incurs legal exposure; but that flavor of skeezy vendor is probably the first against the wall when the ubiquitous online piracy starts up, since they offer none of the benefits of licit vendors and still cost considerably more than just downloading stuff.
Surely they have some heartbreaking story about the destruction of American Jobs and whatnot that covers the latter case?
I certainly wouldn't want to test the limits of Apple's "Global Security" division... Especially not in one of their company towns.
Given that capacitive touchscreens are typically intended to be used with input devices (fingers or those ghastly little rubber stylus-things) that deform under pressure, is there something stopping you from computing approximate pressure by examining the size of the area of contact across the duration of the touch? A light touch would presumably be of nearly constant size, with little or no deformation of the user's finger, a heavy touch would have substantially greater surface area at its peak (when the user's finger is deformed against the rigid glass) than during the beginning or end of the touch.
Are current capacitive touchscreens not high resolution enough for that? Not a high enough refresh rate? Human-meat too unpredictable in deform-ability between subjects?
Is this for anti glare or something?
It seems to be a mixture of 'pointless novelty for its own sake' and 'human legs are roughly cylindrical, so slightly curved objects fit better in pockets that would otherwise be a bit small'.
The driver has admitted to driving the car after an accident, ignoring all warnings until told that the car had a problem so big that it was going to stop ( on fire). I would be interested in seeing the insurance companies response this this...
Unless Team Insurance can send somebody out and prove that the battery pack would have avoided thermal cascade if the driver had immediately stopped the engine (and that doing so is the driver's responsibility, in response to those error codes, rather than Tesla's responsibility to have the battery shut down harder, earlier), it probably won't help them much.
Discharging a battery excessively quickly can start the fire (especially if one of the cells was dodgy); but once one gets going, it doesn't much matter whether you stop the discharge or not, it'll burn.
I'm pretty sure that 'harbor freight' is a polite way of saying 'not for load-bearing or safety-critical applications'.
What I'd be curious to know; but don't really have a good guess 'by intuition' about, is how fast a moving car whose gas tank is punctured 'sheds' fuel (thus reducing the amount of fuel left to roast the occupants alive) by virtue of being relatively thinly protected and close to the bottom-rear of the car.
Moving it closer to the core of the vehicle would reduce the risk of puncture; but it would probably reduce the speed of drainage in the event of a puncture, and make it more likely that some or all of the spilled fuel will end up sloshing around various nooks and crannies of the car, instead of spilling into the road.
This obviously isn't an option with batteries, which are solid and not going anywhere; but with a liquid fuel, are you safer if catastrophic incidents bleed as much fuel as possible, as fast as possible? Or if the tank resists leakage as much as possible?
The man has some seriously low expectations of a car.
For better or worse, by the standards of 'devices with more than a thousand pounds of Li-ion batteries right underneath the operator', responding to a massive puncture wound with a series of error messages and a controlled shutdown is pretty damn polite...
This doesn't necessarily mean you want to be the lucky driver of one; but I'm impressed that the system held off the worst of the failure cascade long enough for him to make it out alive, rather than just burning him into a grease spot and some mixed oxides right then and there. (I had the pleasure of one of Sony's defective battery packs back in the day, and after having to toss it, and the attached computer, off my lap in a hurry, I've never taken the term 'laptop' quite as literally. Those things go pretty fast, once they start.)
Not much of a problem when you're dealing with an MMO-type game that requires you to be online anyway. Not more of a problem than the game-server being down, anyway.
The bigger problem will be getting game developers to take on the challenge (and risk, if it means that they can only sell their game to people who are paying extra for Xbox Live Platinum Cloud Physics Foundation Edition Home Ultimate) of creating a type of game that, like the MMO, is only possible in the context of this remote capability, rather than having the remote capability be an obvious cash grab/lockin attempt. Think of how much people liked the 'online' features of SimCity's recent reboot... It was obvious to all that it's value was close to zero to them, and its costs were substantially greater, and lo, great was their wrath.
In the hypothetical case of the game that could only be realized with 'Flare', people will grumble; but put up with it. If it's transparent to all that you need a monthly subscription and a fast broadband connection just so that the "generic glass fragments flying outward" effect that the art guy spent all day tweaking to look exactly like it does in the movies can be removed and replaced by a realtime finite element analysis of the window and computational fluid dynamics simulations of the trajectories taken by each glass fragment (totally different on the maps with higher atmospheric pressure, worth it!) in real time? That's a tech demo, not a feature.
The other issue with latency is that 'gaming' is something with pretty spiky demand over time. Evenings and weekends? The system will be hammered. During school hours and the workday? Demand minimal and largely impecunious. Holidays and vacation periods? Almost certain to be a peak large enough to provide lots of angry ranting customers (and at a time when lots and lots of other people are putzing around online, reading people's angry opinions and possibly making shopping decisions. Enjoy!).
Unless they can find some off-peak customer who will buy whatever computational capability they are selling (and this could get tricky, since Nvidia and friends tend to price hardware and enable/disable capabilities specifically to discourage cost insensitive 'pro' users from buying cheapy gamer gear rather than expensive workstation gear, so 'Flare' might have some trouble finding a crossover market), they'll be idling a hell of a lot of expensive chips, that aren't getting any better with age, for most of the day, then running into capacity crunches at peak times. That will be miserable.
There might be some feature (I can't think of a killer app offhand; but I'm not excluding the possibility) that would make it worth it, because it simply couldn't be done otherwise (everybody knows that MMORPGs are priced and on a lease in a way that single player or party-level multiplayer RPGs aren't; but you can't really get the 'MMO' in 'MMORPG' any other way, and people seem willing to trade that off); but this will be a hard sell indeed if it mostly just gets used for tech demos and incremental increases in ambient prettiness.
Even on the PC side, which tends to be a bit more willing to spend cash on hardware, the number of gamers who actually own screaming top-of-range systems is pretty small compared to the number of people who buy something good enough and call it a day. Consoles appear to be much more cost sensitive. And, while already having somebody on the hook for XBL or whatever makes billing easier, it doesn't necessarily give you much headroom to increase the price to pay for those extra server resources.
Especially given how good developers have gotten at cheating and fudging on computationally-intractable physics and graphics problems (and, as in the tragic case of more than a few games' 'ragdoll' body-physics systems, how unnatural attempts at 'real' physics can look, with twitch glitches, clipping and contorting, etc. compared to a totally faked; but artfully canned, animation) any use of this system is going to have to be rather creative to be more than incrementally better than far less computationally (and financially, if the game sells a reasonable number of units) expensive faking.
Surely colo security won't suspect a thing if I bolt rack ears onto my sleeping bag (It's, an, um, nearline hot-spare storage appliance...) and scrawl "Coolant" in sharpie on my 2 liter of Mt. Dew?
Except possibly taste...
This might be your objective; but you do realize just how dire the process of getting congress into motion every time a reevaluation of atmospheric particulate emissions is in order, or the question of whether the northwestern arboreal octopus is 'endangered' or 'threatened' comes up, would be?
True enough, they even built their own domain specific C extension for the purpose of evaluating very large datasets (it's called 'Hancock' if you want to go googling yourself).
However, if I've learned anything about the world from software, it's that the fact that the work has already been done is absolutely no obstacle to charging each customer for doing the work...
I stand corrected. Insomnia's charm really starts to wear off once you pass the two day mark...
I had no idea AT&T was such a cheap date. I would have assumed that the 10 million might cover the fee for transferring all those heavy packets through the tubes to NSA HQ, with the data and analysis itself ringing in at at least a factor of ten greater.
Also, given that AT&T has slightly over 100 million wireless customers, never mind all the Ma Bell copper customers, apparently the volume discounts on customer information are pretty good...
The comparison to laptops brings to mind one rather galling issue with the 'BYOD/embracing consumer technology/user-demand-driven/etc.' stuff:
The bottom-feeder laptop slingers are in a bind; because people really do care about price, and they listened; but now they've put out enough shoddy stuff that, for the most part, nobody trusts any unique quality or feature claims that they make(not enough to pay much extra, at least), and so they have to keep squeezing the BoM even harder than the other guy. Only a player who can assert superiority that people will pay extra for has the room to simply refuse to offer cut-down products and only build stuff that you'll have to pay extra for.
With the consumer services side, it's heavily driven by ease-of-use and price. Is it free? Great. Can I clicky-click in with my facebook account credentials? Wonderful. Is it automagic? Hooray.
Sometimes such products simply are superior; but others they are easier to use mostly because they ignore stodgy 'enterprise' requirements that nobody likes dealing with.You think your IT department likes being Officer Hardass about document retention, or not fucking around with HIPAA-covered data? Hardly. Is it their job to tell you that No. You. Cannot. Put. Medical. Records. On. Dropbox. I. Don't. Care. About. iPad. Support? Unfortunately, sometimes it is(and if they were your medical records, you'd want it to be.)
Some do better than others; but it isn't uncommon to find that a service that grew up in consumer land, and still does most of its business there, has spent so much time chasing and polishing what people actually want (cheap, easy) that they either simply cannot sell you the additional features you need, or there are nightmarish integration issues (Why would you want the ability to authenticate against an LDAP server? Every single user can just create a new username and password with us!)
Inertia helps, as does vendor lock in; but some consumer services are treated like cheap, shiny, toys because they are.
I suspect that this scheme is also approximately as ADA (and I assume the EU has an equivalent, it's the sort of thing that they would do) compliant as prior CAPCHAs, which is more or less 'HAHA, ocular cripple, no website for you!', possibly with an audio variant that is either broken and simply not actually a substitute, clear enough to be within attack range of commercially available text-to-speech software, or something allegedly human; but about as comprehensible as a heavy metal vocalist screaming a language you don't know through a couple of tin cans and a piece of string, from underwater...
I'm not sure how more sites don't get smacked for that.
Oh, I don't mean to imply that it's one-sided, that's part of why it works so well. While dramatic (and sometimes fun for its own sake) having to use brute force to compel obedience is relatively expensive and unreliable. It may be a sign of strength; but it's also a sign of incompetence.
The power of the consumer-driven surveillance system is that, at the same time as it provides amazing amounts of information, it is largely seen as non-oppressive, even a collection of features worth paying for. And, unless you just like strutting around like Herr Commandant, a set of mechanisms that is both powerful and has lots of fun gizmos is far superior to one that requires lots of cracking down.
Using US-centric terms is certainly not going ti help the rest of the world ...
We only expect people to be able to solve these puzzles. That's the whole point.
It might actually be worse, since the scheme describes providing a list of descriptions to choose from, one of which is the one that the user originally provided when the inkblot was generated.
Any CAPTCHA-style scheme that has to rely on a list of options (either because the cues are too vague, or because the answers aren't trivially expressible with a mouse and keyboard(or, now, a touchscreen...) inherently runs into the issue that even a bot of essentially zero skill can now achieve a 1/n success rate, for an n length list of options; by pure chance. Unless you want to piss off your users a lot, 1/n is probably actually going to be unnervingly good starting odds, for a trivial scraper-level bot, and the options list also means that any more sophisticated AI approach has a relatively small and discrete universe of possibilities to deal with.
Big Brother is here, and he's a Capitalist Tyrant.
Isn't it terribly inconvenient how market research data, which is so commercially useful that companies collect it out of self interest, technological transaction data, which are necessary to do things like route packets, packages, and phone calls, and the data that would be of interest to a surveillance state are so very similar?
That's really why capitalism has such a bright future as a surveillance dystopia. Anybody with enough cash can hire thugs and informants; but can your commie, or your fascist, operate a comprehensive network of informants at a profit, rather than as a massive drain on the consumer economy that might keep the mobs at bay? Anyone with enough thugs and informants can make tracking collars mandatory; but can they make wearers lovingly recharge them nightly, and pay for customized ringtones?
Could even Big Brother get Winston to rack up some credit card debt to finance a 50" HD telescreen, out of a desire to consume premium content in greater comfort and luxury than his lesser neighbors? Bah. Amateurs, the lot of them.