I think the TV as such is mostly going to go away, at least the form with a tuner. Here in Norway the mean broadband connection is 33 Mbit/s, the median 24 Mbit/s and 90%+ have 4+ Mbit/s.
Here in the US, each individual "channel" can carry 19Mbps. That means your "mean broadband connection" can't even support TWO simultaneous channels at full quality. How many people are in each of those houses, sharing those broadband connections? And how terribly inefficient is it for everyone to unicast what could be broadcast one-time for all?
In the US there are currently 50 channels, for 950Mbps total, continuously. It'll be a while before everyone's internet connections get there. And that's just OTA. Cable services can broadcast many, many times as much data. I'd be inclined to say things could and should go the other way... with everyone getting a networked DVR, and popular YouTube/Netflix/Hulu videos pre-fetched when they are broadcast OTA.
Updating of OTA broadcast, I think, will find more people turning to it and away from shitty cable and satellite, which is already a trend.
People are dropping cable, and more are installing antennas, but TV viewership even on broadcast OTA networks is also falling, as people spend more time on mobile devices...
I expect OTA viewership will take-off, and cable will really die, when mobile devices like tablets start including built-in TV tuners and antennas... Plenty of people with time to waste are away from home, and would like some entertainment that doesn't eat up their astronomically expensive data plan.
It has already been done... But once Apple gets the idea, everybody else will copy them, and the press will gush about how incredibly innovative they are...
Streaming over the Internet, I think, is just another 'pay TV' trap like cable and satellite, and as a matter of fact if you think for a moment, how is it really any different than cable or satellite directly connected to your TV?
Simple... Internet-based services don't hold a geographic monopoly like cable companies do. Lots of competition, versus NO competition.
Changing technology matters, too. Cable couldn't help but be linear, non-interactive a few decades ago. Now they can do things smarter, but many of their declining number of customers demand they maintain the old model, and their contracts with networks are equally difficult to substantially change to allow a new service model.
it could put a call out to any EV currently plugged in saying "I'll pay 6 cents per kWh for what's in your battery". If they don't get as much power as they need, they would put out another request at 7 cents. If you paid 4 cents the previous night, that's a good deal for everyone.
You'd be an idiot to accept that deal!
1) Your EV's battery doesn't charge/discharge at anywhere near 100% efficiency. 2) Batteries have a fixed number of charge/discharge cycles, so the energy you pull out is significantly more expensive than the electric rates. It may not be much cheaper than running a gasoline/electric generator in your back yard... 3) On a TIMEÂ-OFÂ-US rate schedule, you pay about SIX TIMES HIGHER for your daytime electrical usage. I just found Nevada Electric TOU summer rates of $0.06159 for off-peak, and $0.36554 for peak (all-day, really). So until they're paying you more than $0.40, you'd be far better off serving your own household's electric needs from your EV's battery, not selling it back to the grid. Of course nobody does that because of point #2 above. 4) If it was at all a profitable proposition, the power company would cut-out the customer, distribution losses, retail rates, etc., and build their own battery banks. That they don't should be a huge hint that the economics don't work. 5) As an added bonus, your car doesn't have its full range when you suddenly need it, and it will take an hour to top-off the charge. 6) If utilities would quick trying to heavily penalize residential PV customers, they would quickly get lots of Summer peak power.
Buy power to charge up on windy nights and sell on hot days. (In summer, anyway) Bulk wind power in Texas on the spot market has actually dropped below zero on a few occasions.
Except that's not a viable business model. It costs way the hell too much money to build a huge energy-storage facility, to not maximize day-in, day-out profits. In other words, you can't leave your battery-bank half-charged every day, waiting around for the occasional free electricity to take advantage of. In fact it's most profitable to build a facility that doesn't quite meet all the demand.
Also, wind power in Texas only goes negative by 1/3rd of the subsidized price (i.e. producers are earning positive money), so when the subsidizes get reduced or go away, so does the free electricity.
It still boggles my mind how we live in the Information Age and this data was not automatically uploaded and calculated.
If you should have learned anything about "the information Age", it's that life-critical systems should NOT be highly interconnected. If it's just a single 5-digit number that needs to go from point-A to point-B, plain-paper sneakernet is quite convenient and by far the safest and most reliable option.
Maybe we can have a 'White Friday' where people get together and hack up some really interesting thing you can only make.
In other words:
"I'm making you a crappy craft item, and we all have to pretend that because I made it, it's somehow more special than if I'd just gotten you something you wanted..."
The best gifts (for people who can buy their own stuff) are things they simply would never have known they want/need... It can be quite small and low-cost, and still be a great choice. Just don't expect jumping up-and-down the instant they open it.
Black Friday is only worth it if you're extremely poor . ..
The lines outside stores on black friday are probably SHORTER than the lines outside stores when the latest iPhone comes out... Who said anything about it being "worth it"?
good quality decent stuff is never on sale on that day
Of course it is. I got a Samsung smartphone for half-price (just a month or so after it debuted) in a black friday sale. Of course I only bothered because the deal was good for the whole weekend, so I ordered online and picked it up before closing on Sunday. This year I see a 49" Toshiba TV going for $150 instead of $400. Amazon Fire 7" tablet for 30% off.
There are certainly savings to be had, just as much on name brands as generic imports. I certainly wouldn't waste my Thanksgiving camping outside a store, but it might not be as much of a loss for others.
And unlike other tech cities, there's still relatively (for coastal California) affordable housing to be found nearby.
Median price for just a 2-BR in Irvine is $535,000 (And let's not get started on HOA fees)... Not as terrible as the Bay Area, but I wouldn't exactly call it affordable. http://www.trulia.com/real_est...
And if you include "nearby" cities, then prepare to spend 1+ hour every day stuck in traffic, because the roads are backed-up during rush-hour(s), and you can forget about any form of public transit. A lot of people commute nearly 200-miles/day, just for more affordable housing locales.
The recreation options are pretty limited by the sprawl... Hours on the roads to get away from the urban locales and hordes of people overwhelming the all-to-few public spaces. Beaches all locked-up by property developers. The pervasive exclusionary behavior can be observed at public parks, which, upon closer inspection, you'll see lack ANY parking spaces... They're clearly meant for sole use of residents of the immediate area, with others entirely unwelcome.
water, natural gas, electricity, food, money (banking and loans)..etc. If everyone simultaneously tried to obtain as much of the aforementioned resources at any given time, there would be a massive shortfall of said resource. Bandwidth is not an exception
Right... And the FCC has been happy to allow ISPs to throttle customers during times of network congestion. What AT&T, Verizon, and others get in-trouble for is when they chose to throttle the higher-paying customers less than less-profitable customers.
Unused bandwidth is lost, it doesn't accumulate, so caps (instead of throttling) don't make much sense. If ISPs wanted to offer a limited service, rationing bandwidth like it's a scare resource, then they should be advertising their $0.10 per-gigabyte service plan... But they don't want to do that, because almost everybody would pay less every month. Similarly, they don't want to advertise these data caps, because their customers will RUN to their competitors. Instead they want ways to rake-in more cash, all hidden in the fine print, and THAT is what everyone objects to.
No more 50 hours of dialup! No more busy signals! "Unlimited internet" initially meant 24x7 connectivity; you're always online! It has never meant, "Go ahead and max out your download speed 24x7" except to people looking to abuse the fact that they weren't metering bandwidth.
Actually, it did. My cable company was happy to let me max-out my 384kbps connection, non-stop. If it looked like I wasn't going to use that much in the month, they'd double my throughput, but then they didn't advertise it as a 768kbps service to begin with.
What changed was ISPs wanted to advertise higher speeds than their competitor(s), so they ramped-up higher-speed plans, and charged higher prices. So they start offering "200 Mbps" services, with the fine-print stating that you only get a few seconds of "burst" at that speed, and discontinue all their lower-speed plans, charging your grandmother three time as much money every month, just to check her e-mail.
They just assumed the data usage would stay about the same, so their price increase would be like printing money... Instead people found ways to use more of that higher-speed service they had sitting idle, and now the ISPs aren't making as much extra money as they expected to. If ISPs can't afford unlimited 200Mbps they're forcing people to sign-up for, they just need to start offering lower-speed plans again... I'd be happy to switch to even a 1Mbps service, if the monthly fee was sufficiently low. And with that speed, it wouldn't even be possible to go over their data cap, so no need for metering. But that's too straight-forward and honest for them...
It's all about the advertising. Make no mistake, if they had some way to advertise 200Mbps service, while only delivering 1Mbps, they'd do it in a second. But they'd get nailed for that, so they're trying to sneak-in data-caps instead. They would rather really provide an unlimited service than have to honestly advertise their capped & limited plans.
The FCC has been very clear that "unlimited means unlimited", and comes down hard on "those broadband providers who fail to be fully transparent about data limits." I hope that will continue, and apply to these sneaky changes as well.
In the medieval warming period, vineyards were all over northern England.
And immediately after the Medieval Warm Period was the 300+ year-long Little Ice Age... So that's something to look forward to. A nice little reminder to Europeans that they're at the same latitude as Canada and parts of Siberia.
If someone asks you to commit a crime the answer should be an unequivocal "NO".
Except German engineers aren't under US jurisdiction, and how likely is it they even KNOW what US laws are. Or more directly, engineers aren't legal experts. How likely is it that they know the intricacies of any (even German) laws on pollution?
A corporation has armies of lawyers specifically to advise their various employees, and I imagine most engineers don't speak with them directly, either. So they would have gotten their legal advise through multiple layers of indirection through various superiors. Any one of those superiors might have skipped the next tedious step and just summarily passed word down the chain to do it, whether explicitly saying it has been cleared, or just ordering it, with the implication that higher-ups have done proper legal review.
They didn't build air-bags that kill the occupants... they tuned an engine to perform well on a test, and did not find that tuning optimal outside of the test.
It seems like much of the problem originates from the limited spectrum available to wifi, which makes it hard/expensive to cover large, dense spaces, especially if people are bringing in their own network devices.
WiFi has tons spectrum available in the 5GHz band. There's a chicken-and-egg problem of WiFi chipset makers not wanting to spend a few cents to support the higher band while most people remain on 2.4GHz, which then prevents people with 5GHz capable routers from switching to the higher band.
IEEE should have REQUIRED all WiFi chips and devices be able to operate on the 5GHz band, no later than the introduction of 802.11n. They could have done it even a bit earlier than that...
My cousin once pointed out during a food-processing factory visit that non-nut products were crossing the way of nut products but that the allergen information didn't reflect that. She didn't get fired, she got a bonus for it.
...because THAT'S NOT WHISTLEBLOWING! A whistleblower likely would have reported the violation to the FDA, they would have demanded a recall, costing the company millions, and nobody would be getting a raise. But by NOT reporting it & demanding a recall, she's taking the chance that people with allergies might be killed in the interim, in order to save money for the company. That kind of profits-before-safety mentality is exactly the kind of behavior companies typically reward... and so they did.
Admittedly that's an edge-case, where the risk was very low, as was the cost to fix the problem. Decisions are almost never so nice and easy in the real world.
On a Mac, under my privacy settings, on a fresh copy of Vivaldi (which I'd never installed before), the "Preferences | Privacy | Do Not Track | Ask Websites Not to Track Me" is UNCHECKED. I'd post a screenshot if I could, but doesn't that mean "do not track is off by default?"
"Do not track" is an option which MUST be off by default. If you don't understand why, you don't understand what it does. Enabling it by default actually, really, DISables it for everyone.
Owning land was like owning stock, own stock and you can vote on how the company was run, own land and you can vote on how the country was run
Stockholders get a number of votes proportional to the number of shares they own. Property owners still only got one vote, no matter how many pieces or the size of their property... It is much more equalizing than shareholder votes.
And it probably wasn't such a bad idea at the time... With today's 12-years of compulsory education, it's hard to imagine, but there were a large number of people who didn't have the wherewithal to cast even a minimally-informed vote, and it seemed like a good idea to screen them out, somehow.
Biden could probably have pulled it off, but my take on that is that the Clintons still have the best oppo research team, and they found some really juicy dirt on ole Joe. [...] otherwise I don't see them rolling over that easily.
Biden tried and failed to get his party's nomination TWICE already. In this business, the third time isn't the charm, and two strikes is out. His 2008 campaign was effectively over just moments after it started, as he unloaded a half-dozen controversial statements about his opponents that went viral, and never recovered.
His continued poorly-considered statements after becoming Vice President prove he hasn't learned anything, and any Biden campaign is going to be peppered with video of him telling the viewer to "Get a shotgun" followed by usage tips which would get anyone else arrested for negligent discharge of a firearm. Combine that with his advanced age and recently-deceased son, and it's obvious why he wouldn't and even shouldn't run, without resorting to crazy theories.
Maybe the Obama camp knows there are some chickens coming home to roost and they're happy to let a Clinton or an R be the fall guy
There's no major animosity between Obama and Clinton that would cause either to set-up the other for failure. Clinton was a close second in the 2008 primaries, far ahead of Biden, and the obvious presumptive nominee next time around.
And just because Biden was Obama's choice for VP doesn't indicate any particular preference or connection. VPs are generally chosen to fill-in and balance out voting blocks, not because the administration has any particular preference for them. In fact quite the opposite (disdain and animosity towards their chosen VPs) seems to be more common.
Reading his statements, it's clear he was absolutely DELUSIONAL about the effort and skills required to do what he claimed he would do... even worse than Donald Trump.
Go through the comments that followed his recent article in The Atlantic (don't bother reading his statement). Everybody but him (and I maybe TWO random commentators) could see how glaringly irrational and fraught with obvious flaws his whole idea was:
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the US, each individual "channel" can carry 19Mbps. That means your "mean broadband connection" can't even support TWO simultaneous channels at full quality. How many people are in each of those houses, sharing those broadband connections? And how terribly inefficient is it for everyone to unicast what could be broadcast one-time for all?
In the US there are currently 50 channels, for 950Mbps total, continuously. It'll be a while before everyone's internet connections get there. And that's just OTA. Cable services can broadcast many, many times as much data. I'd be inclined to say things could and should go the other way... with everyone getting a networked DVR, and popular YouTube/Netflix/Hulu videos pre-fetched when they are broadcast OTA.
People are dropping cable, and more are installing antennas, but TV viewership even on broadcast OTA networks is also falling, as people spend more time on mobile devices...
http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...
I expect OTA viewership will take-off, and cable will really die, when mobile devices like tablets start including built-in TV tuners and antennas... Plenty of people with time to waste are away from home, and would like some entertainment that doesn't eat up their astronomically expensive data plan.
It has already been done... But once Apple gets the idea, everybody else will copy them, and the press will gush about how incredibly innovative they are...
http://www.amazon.com/RCA-7-In...
http://www.bonanza.com/listing...
Simple... Internet-based services don't hold a geographic monopoly like cable companies do. Lots of competition, versus NO competition.
Changing technology matters, too. Cable couldn't help but be linear, non-interactive a few decades ago. Now they can do things smarter, but many of their declining number of customers demand they maintain the old model, and their contracts with networks are equally difficult to substantially change to allow a new service model.
You'd be an idiot to accept that deal!
1) Your EV's battery doesn't charge/discharge at anywhere near 100% efficiency.
2) Batteries have a fixed number of charge/discharge cycles, so the energy you pull out is significantly more expensive than the electric rates. It may not be much cheaper than running a gasoline/electric generator in your back yard...
3) On a TIMEÂ-OFÂ-US rate schedule, you pay about SIX TIMES HIGHER for your daytime electrical usage. I just found Nevada Electric TOU summer rates of $0.06159 for off-peak, and $0.36554 for peak (all-day, really). So until they're paying you more than $0.40, you'd be far better off serving your own household's electric needs from your EV's battery, not selling it back to the grid. Of course nobody does that because of point #2 above.
4) If it was at all a profitable proposition, the power company would cut-out the customer, distribution losses, retail rates, etc., and build their own battery banks. That they don't should be a huge hint that the economics don't work.
5) As an added bonus, your car doesn't have its full range when you suddenly need it, and it will take an hour to top-off the charge.
6) If utilities would quick trying to heavily penalize residential PV customers, they would quickly get lots of Summer peak power.
Except that's not a viable business model. It costs way the hell too much money to build a huge energy-storage facility, to not maximize day-in, day-out profits. In other words, you can't leave your battery-bank half-charged every day, waiting around for the occasional free electricity to take advantage of. In fact it's most profitable to build a facility that doesn't quite meet all the demand.
Also, wind power in Texas only goes negative by 1/3rd of the subsidized price (i.e. producers are earning positive money), so when the subsidizes get reduced or go away, so does the free electricity.
If you should have learned anything about "the information Age", it's that life-critical systems should NOT be highly interconnected. If it's just a single 5-digit number that needs to go from point-A to point-B, plain-paper sneakernet is quite convenient and by far the safest and most reliable option.
In other words:
"I'm making you a crappy craft item, and we all have to pretend that because I made it, it's somehow more special than if I'd just gotten you something you wanted..."
The best gifts (for people who can buy their own stuff) are things they simply would never have known they want/need... It can be quite small and low-cost, and still be a great choice. Just don't expect jumping up-and-down the instant they open it.
The lines outside stores on black friday are probably SHORTER than the lines outside stores when the latest iPhone comes out... Who said anything about it being "worth it"?
Of course it is. I got a Samsung smartphone for half-price (just a month or so after it debuted) in a black friday sale. Of course I only bothered because the deal was good for the whole weekend, so I ordered online and picked it up before closing on Sunday. This year I see a 49" Toshiba TV going for $150 instead of $400. Amazon Fire 7" tablet for 30% off.
There are certainly savings to be had, just as much on name brands as generic imports. I certainly wouldn't waste my Thanksgiving camping outside a store, but it might not be as much of a loss for others.
I know, it's ironic. But Pipedot has ZERO advertising. Not a banner ad, not sponsored links... nothing.
There will be no similar Black Friday stories on Pipedot...
Then you haven't looked around nearly enough...
Median price for just a 2-BR in Irvine is $535,000 (And let's not get started on HOA fees)... Not as terrible as the Bay Area, but I wouldn't exactly call it affordable. http://www.trulia.com/real_est...
And if you include "nearby" cities, then prepare to spend 1+ hour every day stuck in traffic, because the roads are backed-up during rush-hour(s), and you can forget about any form of public transit. A lot of people commute nearly 200-miles/day, just for more affordable housing locales.
The recreation options are pretty limited by the sprawl... Hours on the roads to get away from the urban locales and hordes of people overwhelming the all-to-few public spaces. Beaches all locked-up by property developers. The pervasive exclusionary behavior can be observed at public parks, which, upon closer inspection, you'll see lack ANY parking spaces... They're clearly meant for sole use of residents of the immediate area, with others entirely unwelcome.
Like food and shelter... Who needs jobs?
Actually, after 15 years, either you're doing it wrong, or you should already have enough money saved to semi-retire in a low-rent area.
Have you looked in the past 5 years? Because very few offer low-end plans anymore. Give Time Warner credit, but they're nearly the only ones.
The magnetic north pole is located in Canada.
Right... And the FCC has been happy to allow ISPs to throttle customers during times of network congestion. What AT&T, Verizon, and others get in-trouble for is when they chose to throttle the higher-paying customers less than less-profitable customers.
Unused bandwidth is lost, it doesn't accumulate, so caps (instead of throttling) don't make much sense. If ISPs wanted to offer a limited service, rationing bandwidth like it's a scare resource, then they should be advertising their $0.10 per-gigabyte service plan... But they don't want to do that, because almost everybody would pay less every month. Similarly, they don't want to advertise these data caps, because their customers will RUN to their competitors. Instead they want ways to rake-in more cash, all hidden in the fine print, and THAT is what everyone objects to.
Actually, it did. My cable company was happy to let me max-out my 384kbps connection, non-stop. If it looked like I wasn't going to use that much in the month, they'd double my throughput, but then they didn't advertise it as a 768kbps service to begin with.
What changed was ISPs wanted to advertise higher speeds than their competitor(s), so they ramped-up higher-speed plans, and charged higher prices. So they start offering "200 Mbps" services, with the fine-print stating that you only get a few seconds of "burst" at that speed, and discontinue all their lower-speed plans, charging your grandmother three time as much money every month, just to check her e-mail.
They just assumed the data usage would stay about the same, so their price increase would be like printing money... Instead people found ways to use more of that higher-speed service they had sitting idle, and now the ISPs aren't making as much extra money as they expected to. If ISPs can't afford unlimited 200Mbps they're forcing people to sign-up for, they just need to start offering lower-speed plans again... I'd be happy to switch to even a 1Mbps service, if the monthly fee was sufficiently low. And with that speed, it wouldn't even be possible to go over their data cap, so no need for metering. But that's too straight-forward and honest for them...
It's all about the advertising. Make no mistake, if they had some way to advertise 200Mbps service, while only delivering 1Mbps, they'd do it in a second. But they'd get nailed for that, so they're trying to sneak-in data-caps instead. They would rather really provide an unlimited service than have to honestly advertise their capped & limited plans.
The FCC has been very clear that "unlimited means unlimited", and comes down hard on "those broadband providers who fail to be fully transparent about data limits." I hope that will continue, and apply to these sneaky changes as well.
And immediately after the Medieval Warm Period was the 300+ year-long Little Ice Age... So that's something to look forward to. A nice little reminder to Europeans that they're at the same latitude as Canada and parts of Siberia.
Except German engineers aren't under US jurisdiction, and how likely is it they even KNOW what US laws are. Or more directly, engineers aren't legal experts. How likely is it that they know the intricacies of any (even German) laws on pollution?
A corporation has armies of lawyers specifically to advise their various employees, and I imagine most engineers don't speak with them directly, either. So they would have gotten their legal advise through multiple layers of indirection through various superiors. Any one of those superiors might have skipped the next tedious step and just summarily passed word down the chain to do it, whether explicitly saying it has been cleared, or just ordering it, with the implication that higher-ups have done proper legal review.
They didn't build air-bags that kill the occupants... they tuned an engine to perform well on a test, and did not find that tuning optimal outside of the test.
WiFi has tons spectrum available in the 5GHz band. There's a chicken-and-egg problem of WiFi chipset makers not wanting to spend a few cents to support the higher band while most people remain on 2.4GHz, which then prevents people with 5GHz capable routers from switching to the higher band.
IEEE should have REQUIRED all WiFi chips and devices be able to operate on the 5GHz band, no later than the introduction of 802.11n. They could have done it even a bit earlier than that...
Admittedly that's an edge-case, where the risk was very low, as was the cost to fix the problem. Decisions are almost never so nice and easy in the real world.
"Do not track" is an option which MUST be off by default. If you don't understand why, you don't understand what it does. Enabling it by default actually, really, DISables it for everyone.
Stockholders get a number of votes proportional to the number of shares they own. Property owners still only got one vote, no matter how many pieces or the size of their property... It is much more equalizing than shareholder votes.
And it probably wasn't such a bad idea at the time... With today's 12-years of compulsory education, it's hard to imagine, but there were a large number of people who didn't have the wherewithal to cast even a minimally-informed vote, and it seemed like a good idea to screen them out, somehow.
Biden tried and failed to get his party's nomination TWICE already. In this business, the third time isn't the charm, and two strikes is out. His 2008 campaign was effectively over just moments after it started, as he unloaded a half-dozen controversial statements about his opponents that went viral, and never recovered.
His continued poorly-considered statements after becoming Vice President prove he hasn't learned anything, and any Biden campaign is going to be peppered with video of him telling the viewer to "Get a shotgun" followed by usage tips which would get anyone else arrested for negligent discharge of a firearm. Combine that with his advanced age and recently-deceased son, and it's obvious why he wouldn't and even shouldn't run, without resorting to crazy theories.
There's no major animosity between Obama and Clinton that would cause either to set-up the other for failure. Clinton was a close second in the 2008 primaries, far ahead of Biden, and the obvious presumptive nominee next time around.
And just because Biden was Obama's choice for VP doesn't indicate any particular preference or connection. VPs are generally chosen to fill-in and balance out voting blocks, not because the administration has any particular preference for them. In fact quite the opposite (disdain and animosity towards their chosen VPs) seems to be more common.
I'm betting the cause of death was bad caps/capacitor plague...
Reading his statements, it's clear he was absolutely DELUSIONAL about the effort and skills required to do what he claimed he would do... even worse than Donald Trump.
Go through the comments that followed his recent article in The Atlantic (don't bother reading his statement). Everybody but him (and I maybe TWO random commentators) could see how glaringly irrational and fraught with obvious flaws his whole idea was:
http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...