Having said that, I'm wondering if the abstract concept has merit. Programming (and, in my case, IT/Sysadmin work) is generally thankless, generally involves odd hours, and can very easily become a high-stress situation.
I think you've hit on the problem.
Taking people for granted, or worse, treating them badly, is the real problem.
Making a point of personally thanking employees and acknowledging their hard work and sacrifices goes a long way. You don't have to overdo it or encourage narcissism, either -- a little goes a long way. Even when (and probably especially) I didn't think it deserved much acknowledgement and despite being extremely cynical, it really does make you feel better about it.
NOT doing it, or worse, demanding the hard work and sacrifices in a you'd-just-better-be-thankful-to-have-this-opportunity kind of way only only builds resentment and hostility. And eventually just turns out more people who figure that being at best a jerk and at worst a tyrant is how you get things done.
How historically widespread is avian flu? Is it something that has existed in nature and been a risk in regions where chickens are raised for food? If avian flu is a new phenomenon or wasn't very common, then why would you expect resistence to it to have developed already?
I think the other problem is that the current industrial farming paradigm for chickens has probably reduced the genetic diversity of chickens a lot. It may be that over the last 50 years that intensive selective breeding for weight or egg production or whatever the industrial attributes used for chicken farming may have accidentally bred out resistence to all manner of diseases while selecting for other qualities.
Geographic dispersion of chicken husbandry may also have limited its spread as well as produced enough minor genetic diversity that a virulent strain of the virus couldn't get established.
It's also possible that chickens breed fast enough that reproduction is a kind of resistence to it. If you can reproduce at fast enough rate, you might produce offspring with natural resistence to prevelant strains of influenza and these birds would grow to dominate.
Influenza also seems to be one of those viruses that mutates enough that natural resistence is difficult to develop in suceptable mammals for all variants of it.
I've been thinking of replacing my iPad 3 and I like the idea of a larger screen iPad, but could they puhleeze add support for a bluetooth mouse?
RDP sessions from an iPad work fine now, but touch just doesn't translate well into Windows UI. A mouse would make an iPad quite useful for a lot of remote admin tasks.
I don't care if you couldn't use the mouse with the home screen or even as a touch replacement, just make it so it can be paired and developers can see mouse events.
I know, I could just buy a regular laptop but they're not nearly as couch/bed friendly as an iPad is, and it's casual settings where I use it most now. But those marginal times where there's a chance I might need to do some kind of work, I find myself bringing my laptop as well because touch is such a shitty way to do Windows UI.
No, a Surface Pro is not a viable replacement. Yes, I do own one and I can't stand the Windows "tablet" mode or its micro-sized app collection, which makes any touch Windows device nonviable.
I don't pretend to know if there's any science to it, but as a fellow Minneapolitan I would swear the sun is...sunnier in Florida than in Minnesota, even comparing the Florida sun in April to the sun in July in Minnesota.
I can spend a whole day in the sun during summer in Minnesota, even if its humid and the dewpoint is near 70, and not feel as hot as in Florida. We went to a water park in Orlando in April and the weather almanac says it was only 88 that day and it was much harsher than it was any day this summer in Minneapolis, including any of the times I spent 8 hours in my boat.
I think Arizona is the same way, although I think I've been told that the dry atmosphere and higher altitude in places actually makes the sun more intense. Florida is a humid climate and low altitude, so none of those would seem to apply.
Declaring a firearm in your luggage has always gotten me first-class VIP treatment.
The last time the counter agent closed the line behind me so she could get her supervisor to make sure everything was handled correctly (and probably to keep the people behind me from flipping out, they want to SEE the firearm).
Then they usually walk me over to TSA where my bags are hand-inspected by the TSA before letting me apply my own, high-quality locks to my bag. I'd swear its saved line-standing time.
The only marginal experience was in Laughlin/Bullhead City, which is barely an airport.
There the gate agent wanted some county sheriff to verify the weapons were unloaded. Since I don't want to make anything easy for a thief, I use trigger locks AND cable lock through the action and/or cylinder, yet Deputy Fife wanted to try to open the cylinder on my revolver AND work the action on my Glock, despite the fact the loading or firing of the guns would have been physically impossible. I actually had to say "Careful, I don't want the action damaged from the locking cables!" before he realized how stupid he was.
Then I had to argue with the TSA agent who didn't want to let me lock my luggage with a secure lock. Fortunately I also carry a recent, laminated copy of the TSA web pages requiring secure locking of checked firearms. "You can't use your own lock." "Yes, I have to, it's your own TSA requirement. Read this." He was pissed, but less pissed than he would have been telling his future colleagues on the Laughlin casino janitorial squad about his past job as a TSA agent.
Strangely the Vegas airport seemed less interested in hand-inspecting my gun case and just ran it through the machine. I told the agent "Those firearms will glow like Christmas on the screen" and the TSA guy said "If we had to hand inspect all firearm luggage at this airport, the lines would extend into the parking lot."
The craziest experience of all traveling with a firearm was trying to check into the Venetian in Vegas. I wanted to check my weapon with security and asked the woman at the desk and she said "Oh, security is just across the casino floor." I wondered how far I would get across the casino floor with a locked aluminum case without being tackled or answering questions from Clark County Sheriffs. As it turns out, I made it with five feet of the entrance before being stopped by two armed guards. They were really nice and took my down to security, checked my weapon, gave me a receipt and let me ride the VIP elevator to my room. On check out, the head of security released my weapon and I asked him if I had broken any laws bringing it on property. He said it wasn't a problem at all, happens all the time but was concerned the check in desk wouldn't page security for me. I thought the armed escort to my cab was a bit much, but again, VIP treatment!
I work for an IT consultancy and we've seen a surprising number of cloud adopters move back on premise because the costs of cloud were too high (primarily), along with the usual raft of support complaints and inflexibility. Cost is a particular problem because cloud vendor pricing is really opaque and even when it's transparent-ish, you need a degree in accounting to sort out the costs.
About the only place we haven't seen as much reverting back to on-premise is email which is probably driven by the belief that Exchange is voodoo and bad memories of poorly installed/maintained Exchange installs, and even then only for smaller clients where the on-premise numbers are harder to swallow. Plus email has a longer history of being cloud-like anyway, from the POP3 days to webmail, so it's kind of familiar, especially to less technical decisionmakers.
I think virtualization has cut into the value proposition of cloud a lot -- if people were still looking at the painful compromise of too many boxes or too many services on one box and the colossal DR headaches of bare metal backup and restore, it would seem a lot more enticing. But with on-premise virtualization you can do a lot of in house DR that's faster than cloud support. Even if its same premise, you end up covering a lot of the likely failure scenarios and you cut your hardware overhead by a metric ton.
I think the other cloud limiter is WAN connectivity -- it really needs to be fast and reliable, preferably separate-vendor-infrastructure redundant which is expensive and not always all that available in every location or for prices that are at all appealing.
We tried a grocery delivery service when it first rolled out here in Minneapolis back in 2000. The whole experience was kind of disappointing. For likely logistical reasons you had some kind of order deadline a day or so before the order would be delivered and of course in sophistication terms, the ordering process was web-2000 clunky.
The bigger problem was that even though someone else picked the items and delivered them, it didn't feel like it saved a ton of time or effort. We have 5 major supermarkets within 10 minutes drive, so transit isn't an issue. With delivery, you still have to unload the containers into your house, so walking the bags from the car isn't really eliminated. Frozen is problematic unless you're home when the delivery comes.
And ordering from a list is problematic -- I often find myself making closer judgements on items I may not buy regularly and you can't do that from a list. Sometimes you have a sudden change about what you might buy in the store -- an inspiration from something you see, a realization that making a specific meal doesn't make sense due to a change in plans, or remembering somehting that wasn't on your shopping list and so on. And then there's choosing produce and meat. I can make decisions about that stuff that fit my own specific standards, not some grocery pickers standards.
There's also the notion that some people like shopping in person. It can be a chore, but I'm sure more than one married parent will admit that sticking their spouse with the kids while you go to the store is a mini-escape, complete with an unadvertised trip to Starbucks and/or some other side trip.
Why believe cats would represent dogs in terms of personality?
Dogs are social pack animals and tend to assimilate into the pack which they belong, basically learning pack behaviors and habits.
So if you raised a clone from a puppy in the same household using the same training you used to raise the original dog, it seems like it would be highly likely that it would have dogs which appeared to have similar personalities.
It may be that the cloned dog actually has a different personality but from the owner's perspective the malleability of the dog due to its social nature may make it seem like it has the same personality of the old dog.
Regardless, it would be fascinating to know what aspects of the dog's personality aren't influenced by training and pack behavior OR genetics.
The whole SPF number doesn't make sense and neither does the amount of UV filtration.
There's four percentage points of difference between SPF 15 and 30, yet the SPF number is double.
Is each additional percentage of UV exposure some kind of logarithmic increase in risk? If moving from 93% to 97% filtration is meaningful, why wouldn't an extra percentage of filtration at SPF 50 also be meaningful?
It also makes me wonder why there are different SPF numbers sold at all. Maybe they should change it to just sell whatever the minimum number is needed for safe exposure to direct sunlight when reapplied every N minutes.
My wife goes to a dermatologist a couple of times per year and talked to her about SPF numbers and her dermatologist was pretty adamant about using some SPF number above 30.
I was kind of surprised, because I know I had read that SPF numbers above some number (30, even, maybe) were only marginally more effective.
I use whatever broad spectrum UVA/UVB spray-on SPF 50+ I can buy cheapest and re-apply every couple of hours or when I've been in the water much or toweled off. I never get sunburn and seldom get much of a tan, either, so I figure it must be working.
CEOs get to make critical decisions, but only the luckiest CEOs are able to be successful making them all on their own. The rest (wisely) rely on an army of advisors and specialists who make the decisions a lot simpler.
There's no way that Steve Jobs or Jack Welch or Elon Musk or any of the lauded Smartest Guys In The Room have the expertise to calculate the tax implications of where they locate a factory or some other critical but important detail.
The other thing is why are there so many critical decisions it takes a CEO to make? That starts to sound like circular logic -- you have critical decisions, therefore you need a super CEO. You have a super CEO because you need to make critical decisions.
Sure, sometimes, but it starts to feel like the people on top have structured control and decisionmaking in a self-serving way that creates the need for a singular central leader. If you were to structure it differently, you might end up with fewer critical decisions that feel more like gambling and more critical decisions that were analytical.
I realize there's a whole leadership/inspiration/idea man component as well, but that can happen without necessarily having a CEO who is a singular, vital authority figure.
The relentless herd mentality and how it bounces from one hyped-up outrage to another in absolute defiance of any measure of rationality or common sense is a real turn off.
I suppose I should just accept the fact that "the mob" and it's virulent, almost palpable ignorance hasn't really changed since the Roman era, but it is depressing and really pushes my misanthropy button.
Ford lists $53 billion in property, plants and equipment on their balance sheet and a gross profit margin of about 15%.
Apple probably couldn't outsource the assembly of a car, they would have to make a major capital investment in assembly facilities. While they have the cash to do so, it doesn't seem likely that they would see this as a good business decision given the size of the investment and the low margin returns in the industry as a whole.
I doubt it matters, Apple isn't likely to enter the car business as an automaker anyway. This project is likely more about generating PR and building a futuristic car as a means to figure out how they can inject themselves into the cars of the future as a supplier.
The point isn't that we don't put men on the moon now technologically, the point is that we DID manage to produce a large population of highly educated adults with very simple educational tools and we did it in spite of fairly substantial things that are currently considered justifications for issuing laptops today -- fewer than half of the population finished high school before then 1930s (meaning mom and dad didn't have much of an education at all), 5% of the population was totally illiterate in any language (the rates were surely higher in lower income groups, higher still if you factor in English proficiency -- mom and dad weren't just uneducated, they couldn't aid their children's education at all), more than 10% of the population was foreign-born (higher by at least a third than present rates) and everyone was poorer.
In a short period of time, we took a population that was broadly educationally deficient in every imaginable way and managed to produce a literate, technically capable population in under a half a century with educational tools whose sophistication hadn't changed much in quite literally centuries.
While, yes, the notion of putting a man on the moon is something of a rhetorical device, there are rational arguments why we don't do it now, and the motivations for doing it may have been less pure from a scientific perspective, the point remains that it was a monumental scientific and engineering achievement and done by people who had only the simplest of educational materials available during their education.
I'd even dispute the notion that e-books make that much of a difference. Most of the arguments for doing so (and most of yours) aren't focused on the development of reading habits or engagement in literature and reading, they're arguments for an economic efficiency in reading materials. We don't have a shortage of books or a lack of access to them. Our county library system (alone) has the 42nd largest book collection in the entire US, combined with the local University collection (available via the public library as well), it's #7, yet the so-called achievement gap remains low and even the white reading proficiency rate is under 70%. Making books available via e-reader isn't likely substantially change this, and I don't doubt that existing e-book readers and e-books provide the visual variety and stimulation to capture young readers the way printed materials do, either.
I'd argue that the biggest problem with our educational system isn't a technology problem, but rooted in the relentless obsession with the achievement gap since the widespread integration of the school system. It's definitely a worrisome issue, but the obsession with this issue has come at the expense of the quality of the educational system. Rather than acknowledging the socio-demographic nature of the problem and continue with demonstrably successful educational methods, we've gyrated between "innovative" curricula to "solve" the problem, diverted educational resources within the schools to social welfare programs and, lately, glommed onto computers as the dues ex machina solution. The lack of achievement isn't an *educational* problem, its a sociology problem in the community. If total social welfare spending can't solve it, diverting education spending into social welfare won't solve it, either, and reduces the value of everyone's education.
You have obvious proof that issuing computers doesn't make for smarter adults. The people who put men on the moon went to schools where advanced learning tools included paper, pencils, slide rules and a chalkboard. Electric lighting was their most valued educational technology. The laptop generation can't put a man on the moon and their big achievment is...Snapchat?
Issuing laptops to students is kind of the perfect storm of misguided intentions. The affluent parent wants to insure their kids have all perks and potential advantages. The middle class parent is afraid if their kids don't have laptops, they'll fall behind. The poor families either don't know what a laptop is or thinks they're being discriminated against somehow if they don't have one.
School administrators want any kind of efficiency they can get and chase the dream of less paper and automation (in addtition to loving big projects that parents like), so they like laptops. Teachers like anything that they think will get the kids to engage. School boards and social welfare actvists within schools don't want anyone to be left behind, so they support laptops for everyone.
Everybody wants a laptop, but teachers don't really have any idea how they make education better, often lack technology skills and are often hampered with disasterous, outdated software. For the most part, nobody's motivated by an idea about how they make learning better, they're just motivated to acquire an economic good for various selfish reasons.
...and maybe holodecks, if you want to include more recent series?
I'm not a fan enough to know the theorized limitations of replicator technology, but the Wikipedia page makes it sound like the limitations were very few. If you own or even have access to a replicator it doesn't sound like many of your needs would be unmet by the replicator. You want a bone-in filet mignon for dinner? Push a button. A molecularly perfect rare wine? Push a button.
Those wants that wouldn't be met by the output of a replicator sound like they would be satisfied by the immersive, more-real-than-real experiences you could have in holodeck. I don't know what the limits of those are, either, but from what I remember on the show the nature of the holodeck seemed to be that you could have pretty much any experience you would want without any of the physical limitations of actual ownership or travel or even temporal limitations.
Outside of the psychology of possession of scarce goods as an end to itself, holodecks would seem to give the vast majority the experience of having them without the need to actually have them, which I think would be even better. Even wealthy people I've known who could satisfy a lot of their own personal wish lists say that the reality of ownership of many things detracts from the experience.
The idea of owning a luxury yacht is awesome, the reality is that they're machines floating in corrosive liquid and require lots of maintenance. Even if you don't do the work yourself, you still run into the nuisance of managing its maintenance and the kind of inherent limitations that come with it -- have to haul it out for weeks periodically for scraping and painting the hell, engines need overhaul, parts need replacing -- you own the thing, but can't use it because the physical world has limits like maintenance. A holodeck yacht would be like owning one without any of the minuses -- it would always be in perfect condition, it could appear anywhere you'd want to use it without the need to get it there, it would never have mechanical faults while you used it.
I would think holodecks would be pretty disruptive to the economy and probably social fabric. Why strive and work to own a Mercedes, take expensive trips, etc, when you can just have the holodeck experience. I think even VR when it becomes mass adopted will put a dent in things like travel. You could tour any museum in the world in your living room.
I've found that the smaller the niche market, the smaller the developer, down to the point where some niches it's like a guy who used to work in that line of business who wrote some software for it where none existed and found it more lucrative to sell it than to stay in the business.
There's always the chance "the guy" was in his 40s when the ball started rolling, he had near zero overhead and made enough where he could retire early. Thus, no need to come out with a new product or make the dialog boxes rounder or whatever passes for innovation. He's 59, living with his wife in a condo in Florida and spends his days fishing and living comfortably without having to work anymore. Not family dynasty rich, but retirement home paid for and enough investment capital to live off forever.
In doing SMB consulting, I've run across a couple of applications like this where the software was written by some guy and one day they call up with a question or somethng and the phone number is now disconnected. In one case, it wasn't a big deal because the application did like one market-specific thing and it worked fine. In another, it was a problem because the application had some kind of home-rolled DRM and needed him to generate a new keyfile if it was installed on a new computer.
90% of the time is dedicated to an episode specific narrative following a formula. Whether it's the detectives getting a case, the scientific guy chasing a new phenomenon, etc. For the most part the, the events in this portion are episode specific although usually there's some new morsel that exposes information the grand conspiracy and larger story arc when that episode's events are resolved.
10% of the time is dedicated to following/expositing the serial aspect of the story, usually some kind of conspiracy or larger story. Very little information is exposed, mostly just enough to let you remember there's this bigger (and often much more interesting) narrative arc taking place.
Mostly this just feels as if the series has been turned on its head. It should be about the 10% part that is the actual "meat" of the story. If (and only if) the dumb series runs enough seasons, the larger story arc might get resolved in some semi-satisfying way. Mostly it seems like the writer had a pretty cool idea but didn't know what to do with it, and fell back on the "case of the week" to fill it in because the bigger idea really didn't have much behind it.
In some cases, this can be tolerable but most of the time you just feel strung along, like there's this really cool story that's going to get broken wide open...and then nothing, or something entirely lame like Lost happens.
In contrast, really good series (like the Wire) manage to make the entire series about the story arc and the individual episodes expand and bring it out. Part of the Wire's specific genius was that it did this well and also had a seasonal anthology feel to it as the action shifted from the corner, to the port, to the dealers again without losing the larger momentum but giving us different characters and settings, too.
When I start a new series if I feel like I'm being strung along by episode 4 or 5, chances are I won't ever get resolution and I just drop it.
The thing is, I don't think it would be a stated business strategy.
The nature of most moral hazards isn't that they're obvious conspiracies to do the wrong thing, but a set of biases and bad incentives that lend themselves to creating a situation where bad choices get made.
As an example, drug addiction is a moral hazard for doctors. Doctors know that drugs can be habit forming. We expect doctors to be experts in administering them, to have reasonable ease of access to them for treating patients as best they can. The doctor believes his own expertise will prevent him from getting addicted to them. But expertise plus overconfidence in their own knowledge plus access results in a ton of doctors getting hooked on drugs.
Taser for the most part sells stuff to cops. Taser would like to keep cops happy and keep buying cop stuff. Taser "knows its market" and understands what they want. At some point the desire to make money selling stuff to cops and knowing what cops want lends itself to creating holes in accountability, not because some executive said "they're good guys and good customers, they shouldn't get dragged down because some douchebag criminal got a good attorney" but because they want to please their market for reasons that are independently all completely normal and reasonable.
With automated systems, it's much harder to argue that the problem wasn't deliberate.
"When asked why the body camera video of the police beating didn't exist, despite the system supposedly being automated to upload them to remote secure storage, officials noted that 'network limitations' caused by 'budget constraints' prevented the video from being immediately uploaded as originally designed. Police data networks were overwhelmed when the system was first rolled out and the vendor, Taser, Inc, added an on-site caching feature that uploaded the videos in a slower and more controlled fashion to prevent network overload. A problem with the caching server at Police HQ caused 'only a handful' of videos to be lost and Taser officials said this risk will be fixed in a new version available sometime next year."
Desire to sell your product + pleasing your customer = exploitable hole, even though nobody actually *conspired* to do this even though the design goal was the opposite. Had a vendor been selected whose first concern was guaranteeing data integrity, not necessarily accommodating the end user's specific desires, the hazard could be avoided. But this only happens if the vendor's allegiance can be to someone other than the cops, like some kind of oversight board whose principal interest is in data integrity.
This way the vendor's goals are aligned with the purchaser's goals and the hazard is avoided.
But that's thing with a moral hazard -- just look at banking and securities. If you jack around the majority of your customers, it will become public and cause a shitstorm, but it doesn't make the moral hazard go away nor has it prevented all manner of moral hazards in banking from being exploited.
And not every -- or any -- potentially "lost" video is going to be tied to some high profile incident where some innocent black woman in a wheel chair took a dozen rounds of 00-buck to her face. The most likely ones will be the low profile ones nobody cares about, where some obvious drunk got manhandled after bar closing and a dozen citizen eyewitness statements back the police version of events completely.
And it's also not likely that Taser would just delete videos themselves -- that's too obvious. Rather than running a system that's totally secure from police tampering, the inclination will be to provide a "friendly" system that offers soft points where the police can prevent videos from getting uploaded at all under the guise of technical glitch or something.
The thing is, you're *already* "having a company come in" as a carrier ISP to supply uplink for the municipal fiber. And hopefully/presumably more than one carrier is being used for redundancy. I would also guess that these carrier facility equipment rollouts aren't just some 2U Cisco router with a fiber port and an ethernet jack. Chances are there's enough uplink brought in by all the carriers that they could easily resell uplink to other 'ISPs" in the muni NOC.
I don't know what equipment the muni is using for terminating the fiber connections, but what do you want to guess it's MPLS or something which would easily have the facility to map and aggregate endpoints to some other endpoint within their NOC which would then act like a local ISP. They're probably already doing this so the water department/school/etc can have a private LAN that spans sites.
AFAIK there are still a fair number of regional/smaller ISPs serving niche markets who might be interested in opening a branch for that many fiber connected customers or who could be tasked with acting as the "caretaker" of the L2 network (getting the muni out of that headache) and for whom adding layer 3 service would be no worse than break even if they are already paid for managing the L2 network. In Minneapolis they did something similar with city-wide wifi -- the network was built and managed by an ISP. I doubt the paying wifi customers meet their costs, but the added costs of retail wifi are really low when you're being paid to manage the physical network.
Splitting off layer-2 from layer-3 would also make a ton of sense from a business incubation perspective, because if you were slightly forward thinking the the muni fiber NOC wouldn't just be a spare room in the basement of city hall, but a datacenter-like space which would have room for colo for whoever wanted to be an ISP and for local businesses looking for an offsite location.
Now you've got a big-city style datacenter facility with a large geographic fiber plant connected. It might attract a lot of other interested business looking for a well-connected smaller town to open a branch office or take advantage of lower cost of doing business. It's about the equivalent of widening the county road to the Interstate and paving your gravel streets.
I think the model like DSL service should be the one that municipal fiber follows -- the municipal fiber just provides the layer 2 connectivity and you choose which ISP you want.
If somebody wants to start a geek-centric service with static IPs and where technical support is limited to setting reverse DNS, great, they can buy a rack or whatever at the municipal fiber hosting center and sell that service to whoever's interested.
If Comcast or AOL or whoever wants to offer their mega-consumer focused service with dynamic IPs, webmail, coupon offers, ad-injection, great, they can lease a rack, too and sell that.
Plenty of cheapskates and technophobes will pick the consumer service for all the add-ons and technical support and the geeks willing to spend the same or just slightly more for static IP service with none of the bullshit can pick that.
There was a time where a company I knew set themselves up as an ISP choice for DSL. Employees could get DSL from the phone company, choose their employer as their ISP and they had basically a hardwired VPN to work (that solution has some issues in terms of personal-vs-work access, but IIRC from the network guy at that company I talked to they had an entirely separate Internet provider they routed that traffic over). I think whatever setup and operational cost was greatly mitigated by reduced costs related to remote access and the legion of VIPs who wanted their personal ISP bill reimbursed because that "expense" got taken care off at wholesale.
The analogy that makes the most sense is the roads. The city builds 'em, fixes 'em and sets some pretty basic usage rules, but you buy your transportation and delivery services from other companies. If I want a pizza, I pick whoever provides the pizza I want and they just use the road to get it to me.
I think it is worse -- when the police control it, the moral hazard and control issues are pretty obvious.
When a third party controls it, it's more opaque. The police have plausible deniability to say "But we use a third party vendor, we didn't delete that video." The fact that Taser has a financial relationship with police departments is much less clear (to the general public at least) and it's a lot less clear that Taser has a neutral motivation with regard to these videos.
To me, the solution should more likely be that some police oversight entity selects/approves/controls the video storage contract and probably should be contracting with a vendor who doesn't have a specific dependency on the police as a target market. That may be more difficult if regulations regarding these videos lend themselves to market specialization and you end up needing vendors who specialize in those markets.
You'll end up with a similar moral hazard, but at least you'll have reduced the amount of financial influence the police have over the vendors.
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Having said that, I'm wondering if the abstract concept has merit. Programming (and, in my case, IT/Sysadmin work) is generally thankless, generally involves odd hours, and can very easily become a high-stress situation.
I think you've hit on the problem.
Taking people for granted, or worse, treating them badly, is the real problem.
Making a point of personally thanking employees and acknowledging their hard work and sacrifices goes a long way. You don't have to overdo it or encourage narcissism, either -- a little goes a long way. Even when (and probably especially) I didn't think it deserved much acknowledgement and despite being extremely cynical, it really does make you feel better about it.
NOT doing it, or worse, demanding the hard work and sacrifices in a you'd-just-better-be-thankful-to-have-this-opportunity kind of way only only builds resentment and hostility. And eventually just turns out more people who figure that being at best a jerk and at worst a tyrant is how you get things done.
How historically widespread is avian flu? Is it something that has existed in nature and been a risk in regions where chickens are raised for food? If avian flu is a new phenomenon or wasn't very common, then why would you expect resistence to it to have developed already?
I think the other problem is that the current industrial farming paradigm for chickens has probably reduced the genetic diversity of chickens a lot. It may be that over the last 50 years that intensive selective breeding for weight or egg production or whatever the industrial attributes used for chicken farming may have accidentally bred out resistence to all manner of diseases while selecting for other qualities.
Geographic dispersion of chicken husbandry may also have limited its spread as well as produced enough minor genetic diversity that a virulent strain of the virus couldn't get established.
It's also possible that chickens breed fast enough that reproduction is a kind of resistence to it. If you can reproduce at fast enough rate, you might produce offspring with natural resistence to prevelant strains of influenza and these birds would grow to dominate.
Influenza also seems to be one of those viruses that mutates enough that natural resistence is difficult to develop in suceptable mammals for all variants of it.
I've been thinking of replacing my iPad 3 and I like the idea of a larger screen iPad, but could they puhleeze add support for a bluetooth mouse?
RDP sessions from an iPad work fine now, but touch just doesn't translate well into Windows UI. A mouse would make an iPad quite useful for a lot of remote admin tasks.
I don't care if you couldn't use the mouse with the home screen or even as a touch replacement, just make it so it can be paired and developers can see mouse events.
I know, I could just buy a regular laptop but they're not nearly as couch/bed friendly as an iPad is, and it's casual settings where I use it most now. But those marginal times where there's a chance I might need to do some kind of work, I find myself bringing my laptop as well because touch is such a shitty way to do Windows UI.
No, a Surface Pro is not a viable replacement. Yes, I do own one and I can't stand the Windows "tablet" mode or its micro-sized app collection, which makes any touch Windows device nonviable.
I don't pretend to know if there's any science to it, but as a fellow Minneapolitan I would swear the sun is...sunnier in Florida than in Minnesota, even comparing the Florida sun in April to the sun in July in Minnesota.
I can spend a whole day in the sun during summer in Minnesota, even if its humid and the dewpoint is near 70, and not feel as hot as in Florida. We went to a water park in Orlando in April and the weather almanac says it was only 88 that day and it was much harsher than it was any day this summer in Minneapolis, including any of the times I spent 8 hours in my boat.
I think Arizona is the same way, although I think I've been told that the dry atmosphere and higher altitude in places actually makes the sun more intense. Florida is a humid climate and low altitude, so none of those would seem to apply.
Declaring a firearm in your luggage has always gotten me first-class VIP treatment.
The last time the counter agent closed the line behind me so she could get her supervisor to make sure everything was handled correctly (and probably to keep the people behind me from flipping out, they want to SEE the firearm).
Then they usually walk me over to TSA where my bags are hand-inspected by the TSA before letting me apply my own, high-quality locks to my bag. I'd swear its saved line-standing time.
The only marginal experience was in Laughlin/Bullhead City, which is barely an airport.
There the gate agent wanted some county sheriff to verify the weapons were unloaded. Since I don't want to make anything easy for a thief, I use trigger locks AND cable lock through the action and/or cylinder, yet Deputy Fife wanted to try to open the cylinder on my revolver AND work the action on my Glock, despite the fact the loading or firing of the guns would have been physically impossible. I actually had to say "Careful, I don't want the action damaged from the locking cables!" before he realized how stupid he was.
Then I had to argue with the TSA agent who didn't want to let me lock my luggage with a secure lock. Fortunately I also carry a recent, laminated copy of the TSA web pages requiring secure locking of checked firearms. "You can't use your own lock." "Yes, I have to, it's your own TSA requirement. Read this." He was pissed, but less pissed than he would have been telling his future colleagues on the Laughlin casino janitorial squad about his past job as a TSA agent.
Strangely the Vegas airport seemed less interested in hand-inspecting my gun case and just ran it through the machine. I told the agent "Those firearms will glow like Christmas on the screen" and the TSA guy said "If we had to hand inspect all firearm luggage at this airport, the lines would extend into the parking lot."
The craziest experience of all traveling with a firearm was trying to check into the Venetian in Vegas. I wanted to check my weapon with security and asked the woman at the desk and she said "Oh, security is just across the casino floor." I wondered how far I would get across the casino floor with a locked aluminum case without being tackled or answering questions from Clark County Sheriffs. As it turns out, I made it with five feet of the entrance before being stopped by two armed guards. They were really nice and took my down to security, checked my weapon, gave me a receipt and let me ride the VIP elevator to my room. On check out, the head of security released my weapon and I asked him if I had broken any laws bringing it on property. He said it wasn't a problem at all, happens all the time but was concerned the check in desk wouldn't page security for me. I thought the armed escort to my cab was a bit much, but again, VIP treatment!
I work for an IT consultancy and we've seen a surprising number of cloud adopters move back on premise because the costs of cloud were too high (primarily), along with the usual raft of support complaints and inflexibility. Cost is a particular problem because cloud vendor pricing is really opaque and even when it's transparent-ish, you need a degree in accounting to sort out the costs.
About the only place we haven't seen as much reverting back to on-premise is email which is probably driven by the belief that Exchange is voodoo and bad memories of poorly installed/maintained Exchange installs, and even then only for smaller clients where the on-premise numbers are harder to swallow. Plus email has a longer history of being cloud-like anyway, from the POP3 days to webmail, so it's kind of familiar, especially to less technical decisionmakers.
I think virtualization has cut into the value proposition of cloud a lot -- if people were still looking at the painful compromise of too many boxes or too many services on one box and the colossal DR headaches of bare metal backup and restore, it would seem a lot more enticing. But with on-premise virtualization you can do a lot of in house DR that's faster than cloud support. Even if its same premise, you end up covering a lot of the likely failure scenarios and you cut your hardware overhead by a metric ton.
I think the other cloud limiter is WAN connectivity -- it really needs to be fast and reliable, preferably separate-vendor-infrastructure redundant which is expensive and not always all that available in every location or for prices that are at all appealing.
We tried a grocery delivery service when it first rolled out here in Minneapolis back in 2000. The whole experience was kind of disappointing. For likely logistical reasons you had some kind of order deadline a day or so before the order would be delivered and of course in sophistication terms, the ordering process was web-2000 clunky.
The bigger problem was that even though someone else picked the items and delivered them, it didn't feel like it saved a ton of time or effort. We have 5 major supermarkets within 10 minutes drive, so transit isn't an issue. With delivery, you still have to unload the containers into your house, so walking the bags from the car isn't really eliminated. Frozen is problematic unless you're home when the delivery comes.
And ordering from a list is problematic -- I often find myself making closer judgements on items I may not buy regularly and you can't do that from a list. Sometimes you have a sudden change about what you might buy in the store -- an inspiration from something you see, a realization that making a specific meal doesn't make sense due to a change in plans, or remembering somehting that wasn't on your shopping list and so on. And then there's choosing produce and meat. I can make decisions about that stuff that fit my own specific standards, not some grocery pickers standards.
There's also the notion that some people like shopping in person. It can be a chore, but I'm sure more than one married parent will admit that sticking their spouse with the kids while you go to the store is a mini-escape, complete with an unadvertised trip to Starbucks and/or some other side trip.
Why believe cats would represent dogs in terms of personality?
Dogs are social pack animals and tend to assimilate into the pack which they belong, basically learning pack behaviors and habits.
So if you raised a clone from a puppy in the same household using the same training you used to raise the original dog, it seems like it would be highly likely that it would have dogs which appeared to have similar personalities.
It may be that the cloned dog actually has a different personality but from the owner's perspective the malleability of the dog due to its social nature may make it seem like it has the same personality of the old dog.
Regardless, it would be fascinating to know what aspects of the dog's personality aren't influenced by training and pack behavior OR genetics.
The whole SPF number doesn't make sense and neither does the amount of UV filtration.
There's four percentage points of difference between SPF 15 and 30, yet the SPF number is double.
Is each additional percentage of UV exposure some kind of logarithmic increase in risk? If moving from 93% to 97% filtration is meaningful, why wouldn't an extra percentage of filtration at SPF 50 also be meaningful?
It also makes me wonder why there are different SPF numbers sold at all. Maybe they should change it to just sell whatever the minimum number is needed for safe exposure to direct sunlight when reapplied every N minutes.
My wife goes to a dermatologist a couple of times per year and talked to her about SPF numbers and her dermatologist was pretty adamant about using some SPF number above 30.
I was kind of surprised, because I know I had read that SPF numbers above some number (30, even, maybe) were only marginally more effective.
I use whatever broad spectrum UVA/UVB spray-on SPF 50+ I can buy cheapest and re-apply every couple of hours or when I've been in the water much or toweled off. I never get sunburn and seldom get much of a tan, either, so I figure it must be working.
CEOs get to make critical decisions, but only the luckiest CEOs are able to be successful making them all on their own. The rest (wisely) rely on an army of advisors and specialists who make the decisions a lot simpler.
There's no way that Steve Jobs or Jack Welch or Elon Musk or any of the lauded Smartest Guys In The Room have the expertise to calculate the tax implications of where they locate a factory or some other critical but important detail.
The other thing is why are there so many critical decisions it takes a CEO to make? That starts to sound like circular logic -- you have critical decisions, therefore you need a super CEO. You have a super CEO because you need to make critical decisions.
Sure, sometimes, but it starts to feel like the people on top have structured control and decisionmaking in a self-serving way that creates the need for a singular central leader. If you were to structure it differently, you might end up with fewer critical decisions that feel more like gambling and more critical decisions that were analytical.
I realize there's a whole leadership/inspiration/idea man component as well, but that can happen without necessarily having a CEO who is a singular, vital authority figure.
The relentless herd mentality and how it bounces from one hyped-up outrage to another in absolute defiance of any measure of rationality or common sense is a real turn off.
I suppose I should just accept the fact that "the mob" and it's virulent, almost palpable ignorance hasn't really changed since the Roman era, but it is depressing and really pushes my misanthropy button.
Ford lists $53 billion in property, plants and equipment on their balance sheet and a gross profit margin of about 15%.
Apple probably couldn't outsource the assembly of a car, they would have to make a major capital investment in assembly facilities. While they have the cash to do so, it doesn't seem likely that they would see this as a good business decision given the size of the investment and the low margin returns in the industry as a whole.
I doubt it matters, Apple isn't likely to enter the car business as an automaker anyway. This project is likely more about generating PR and building a futuristic car as a means to figure out how they can inject themselves into the cars of the future as a supplier.
The point isn't that we don't put men on the moon now technologically, the point is that we DID manage to produce a large population of highly educated adults with very simple educational tools and we did it in spite of fairly substantial things that are currently considered justifications for issuing laptops today -- fewer than half of the population finished high school before then 1930s (meaning mom and dad didn't have much of an education at all), 5% of the population was totally illiterate in any language (the rates were surely higher in lower income groups, higher still if you factor in English proficiency -- mom and dad weren't just uneducated, they couldn't aid their children's education at all), more than 10% of the population was foreign-born (higher by at least a third than present rates) and everyone was poorer.
In a short period of time, we took a population that was broadly educationally deficient in every imaginable way and managed to produce a literate, technically capable population in under a half a century with educational tools whose sophistication hadn't changed much in quite literally centuries.
While, yes, the notion of putting a man on the moon is something of a rhetorical device, there are rational arguments why we don't do it now, and the motivations for doing it may have been less pure from a scientific perspective, the point remains that it was a monumental scientific and engineering achievement and done by people who had only the simplest of educational materials available during their education.
I'd even dispute the notion that e-books make that much of a difference. Most of the arguments for doing so (and most of yours) aren't focused on the development of reading habits or engagement in literature and reading, they're arguments for an economic efficiency in reading materials. We don't have a shortage of books or a lack of access to them. Our county library system (alone) has the 42nd largest book collection in the entire US, combined with the local University collection (available via the public library as well), it's #7, yet the so-called achievement gap remains low and even the white reading proficiency rate is under 70%. Making books available via e-reader isn't likely substantially change this, and I don't doubt that existing e-book readers and e-books provide the visual variety and stimulation to capture young readers the way printed materials do, either.
I'd argue that the biggest problem with our educational system isn't a technology problem, but rooted in the relentless obsession with the achievement gap since the widespread integration of the school system. It's definitely a worrisome issue, but the obsession with this issue has come at the expense of the quality of the educational system. Rather than acknowledging the socio-demographic nature of the problem and continue with demonstrably successful educational methods, we've gyrated between "innovative" curricula to "solve" the problem, diverted educational resources within the schools to social welfare programs and, lately, glommed onto computers as the dues ex machina solution. The lack of achievement isn't an *educational* problem, its a sociology problem in the community. If total social welfare spending can't solve it, diverting education spending into social welfare won't solve it, either, and reduces the value of everyone's education.
I kind of miss the old catalog style of Yahoo. In a smaller web it was sometimes useful to find a listing of web sites categorized by topic.
You have obvious proof that issuing computers doesn't make for smarter adults. The people who put men on the moon went to schools where advanced learning tools included paper, pencils, slide rules and a chalkboard. Electric lighting was their most valued educational technology. The laptop generation can't put a man on the moon and their big achievment is...Snapchat?
Issuing laptops to students is kind of the perfect storm of misguided intentions. The affluent parent wants to insure their kids have all perks and potential advantages. The middle class parent is afraid if their kids don't have laptops, they'll fall behind. The poor families either don't know what a laptop is or thinks they're being discriminated against somehow if they don't have one.
School administrators want any kind of efficiency they can get and chase the dream of less paper and automation (in addtition to loving big projects that parents like), so they like laptops. Teachers like anything that they think will get the kids to engage. School boards and social welfare actvists within schools don't want anyone to be left behind, so they support laptops for everyone.
Everybody wants a laptop, but teachers don't really have any idea how they make education better, often lack technology skills and are often hampered with disasterous, outdated software. For the most part, nobody's motivated by an idea about how they make learning better, they're just motivated to acquire an economic good for various selfish reasons.
...and maybe holodecks, if you want to include more recent series?
I'm not a fan enough to know the theorized limitations of replicator technology, but the Wikipedia page makes it sound like the limitations were very few. If you own or even have access to a replicator it doesn't sound like many of your needs would be unmet by the replicator. You want a bone-in filet mignon for dinner? Push a button. A molecularly perfect rare wine? Push a button.
Those wants that wouldn't be met by the output of a replicator sound like they would be satisfied by the immersive, more-real-than-real experiences you could have in holodeck. I don't know what the limits of those are, either, but from what I remember on the show the nature of the holodeck seemed to be that you could have pretty much any experience you would want without any of the physical limitations of actual ownership or travel or even temporal limitations.
Outside of the psychology of possession of scarce goods as an end to itself, holodecks would seem to give the vast majority the experience of having them without the need to actually have them, which I think would be even better. Even wealthy people I've known who could satisfy a lot of their own personal wish lists say that the reality of ownership of many things detracts from the experience.
The idea of owning a luxury yacht is awesome, the reality is that they're machines floating in corrosive liquid and require lots of maintenance. Even if you don't do the work yourself, you still run into the nuisance of managing its maintenance and the kind of inherent limitations that come with it -- have to haul it out for weeks periodically for scraping and painting the hell, engines need overhaul, parts need replacing -- you own the thing, but can't use it because the physical world has limits like maintenance. A holodeck yacht would be like owning one without any of the minuses -- it would always be in perfect condition, it could appear anywhere you'd want to use it without the need to get it there, it would never have mechanical faults while you used it.
I would think holodecks would be pretty disruptive to the economy and probably social fabric. Why strive and work to own a Mercedes, take expensive trips, etc, when you can just have the holodeck experience. I think even VR when it becomes mass adopted will put a dent in things like travel. You could tour any museum in the world in your living room.
I've found that the smaller the niche market, the smaller the developer, down to the point where some niches it's like a guy who used to work in that line of business who wrote some software for it where none existed and found it more lucrative to sell it than to stay in the business.
There's always the chance "the guy" was in his 40s when the ball started rolling, he had near zero overhead and made enough where he could retire early. Thus, no need to come out with a new product or make the dialog boxes rounder or whatever passes for innovation. He's 59, living with his wife in a condo in Florida and spends his days fishing and living comfortably without having to work anymore. Not family dynasty rich, but retirement home paid for and enough investment capital to live off forever.
In doing SMB consulting, I've run across a couple of applications like this where the software was written by some guy and one day they call up with a question or somethng and the phone number is now disconnected. In one case, it wasn't a big deal because the application did like one market-specific thing and it worked fine. In another, it was a problem because the application had some kind of home-rolled DRM and needed him to generate a new keyfile if it was installed on a new computer.
Too many seem to have the following structure:
90% of the time is dedicated to an episode specific narrative following a formula. Whether it's the detectives getting a case, the scientific guy chasing a new phenomenon, etc. For the most part the, the events in this portion are episode specific although usually there's some new morsel that exposes information the grand conspiracy and larger story arc when that episode's events are resolved.
10% of the time is dedicated to following/expositing the serial aspect of the story, usually some kind of conspiracy or larger story. Very little information is exposed, mostly just enough to let you remember there's this bigger (and often much more interesting) narrative arc taking place.
Mostly this just feels as if the series has been turned on its head. It should be about the 10% part that is the actual "meat" of the story. If (and only if) the dumb series runs enough seasons, the larger story arc might get resolved in some semi-satisfying way. Mostly it seems like the writer had a pretty cool idea but didn't know what to do with it, and fell back on the "case of the week" to fill it in because the bigger idea really didn't have much behind it.
In some cases, this can be tolerable but most of the time you just feel strung along, like there's this really cool story that's going to get broken wide open...and then nothing, or something entirely lame like Lost happens.
In contrast, really good series (like the Wire) manage to make the entire series about the story arc and the individual episodes expand and bring it out. Part of the Wire's specific genius was that it did this well and also had a seasonal anthology feel to it as the action shifted from the corner, to the port, to the dealers again without losing the larger momentum but giving us different characters and settings, too.
When I start a new series if I feel like I'm being strung along by episode 4 or 5, chances are I won't ever get resolution and I just drop it.
The thing is, I don't think it would be a stated business strategy.
The nature of most moral hazards isn't that they're obvious conspiracies to do the wrong thing, but a set of biases and bad incentives that lend themselves to creating a situation where bad choices get made.
As an example, drug addiction is a moral hazard for doctors. Doctors know that drugs can be habit forming. We expect doctors to be experts in administering them, to have reasonable ease of access to them for treating patients as best they can. The doctor believes his own expertise will prevent him from getting addicted to them. But expertise plus overconfidence in their own knowledge plus access results in a ton of doctors getting hooked on drugs.
Taser for the most part sells stuff to cops. Taser would like to keep cops happy and keep buying cop stuff. Taser "knows its market" and understands what they want. At some point the desire to make money selling stuff to cops and knowing what cops want lends itself to creating holes in accountability, not because some executive said "they're good guys and good customers, they shouldn't get dragged down because some douchebag criminal got a good attorney" but because they want to please their market for reasons that are independently all completely normal and reasonable.
With automated systems, it's much harder to argue that the problem wasn't deliberate.
"When asked why the body camera video of the police beating didn't exist, despite the system supposedly being automated to upload them to remote secure storage, officials noted that 'network limitations' caused by 'budget constraints' prevented the video from being immediately uploaded as originally designed. Police data networks were overwhelmed when the system was first rolled out and the vendor, Taser, Inc, added an on-site caching feature that uploaded the videos in a slower and more controlled fashion to prevent network overload. A problem with the caching server at Police HQ caused 'only a handful' of videos to be lost and Taser officials said this risk will be fixed in a new version available sometime next year."
Desire to sell your product + pleasing your customer = exploitable hole, even though nobody actually *conspired* to do this even though the design goal was the opposite. Had a vendor been selected whose first concern was guaranteeing data integrity, not necessarily accommodating the end user's specific desires, the hazard could be avoided. But this only happens if the vendor's allegiance can be to someone other than the cops, like some kind of oversight board whose principal interest is in data integrity.
This way the vendor's goals are aligned with the purchaser's goals and the hazard is avoided.
But that's thing with a moral hazard -- just look at banking and securities. If you jack around the majority of your customers, it will become public and cause a shitstorm, but it doesn't make the moral hazard go away nor has it prevented all manner of moral hazards in banking from being exploited.
And not every -- or any -- potentially "lost" video is going to be tied to some high profile incident where some innocent black woman in a wheel chair took a dozen rounds of 00-buck to her face. The most likely ones will be the low profile ones nobody cares about, where some obvious drunk got manhandled after bar closing and a dozen citizen eyewitness statements back the police version of events completely.
And it's also not likely that Taser would just delete videos themselves -- that's too obvious. Rather than running a system that's totally secure from police tampering, the inclination will be to provide a "friendly" system that offers soft points where the police can prevent videos from getting uploaded at all under the guise of technical glitch or something.
The thing is, you're *already* "having a company come in" as a carrier ISP to supply uplink for the municipal fiber. And hopefully/presumably more than one carrier is being used for redundancy. I would also guess that these carrier facility equipment rollouts aren't just some 2U Cisco router with a fiber port and an ethernet jack. Chances are there's enough uplink brought in by all the carriers that they could easily resell uplink to other 'ISPs" in the muni NOC.
I don't know what equipment the muni is using for terminating the fiber connections, but what do you want to guess it's MPLS or something which would easily have the facility to map and aggregate endpoints to some other endpoint within their NOC which would then act like a local ISP. They're probably already doing this so the water department/school/etc can have a private LAN that spans sites.
AFAIK there are still a fair number of regional/smaller ISPs serving niche markets who might be interested in opening a branch for that many fiber connected customers or who could be tasked with acting as the "caretaker" of the L2 network (getting the muni out of that headache) and for whom adding layer 3 service would be no worse than break even if they are already paid for managing the L2 network. In Minneapolis they did something similar with city-wide wifi -- the network was built and managed by an ISP. I doubt the paying wifi customers meet their costs, but the added costs of retail wifi are really low when you're being paid to manage the physical network.
Splitting off layer-2 from layer-3 would also make a ton of sense from a business incubation perspective, because if you were slightly forward thinking the the muni fiber NOC wouldn't just be a spare room in the basement of city hall, but a datacenter-like space which would have room for colo for whoever wanted to be an ISP and for local businesses looking for an offsite location.
Now you've got a big-city style datacenter facility with a large geographic fiber plant connected. It might attract a lot of other interested business looking for a well-connected smaller town to open a branch office or take advantage of lower cost of doing business. It's about the equivalent of widening the county road to the Interstate and paving your gravel streets.
I think the model like DSL service should be the one that municipal fiber follows -- the municipal fiber just provides the layer 2 connectivity and you choose which ISP you want.
If somebody wants to start a geek-centric service with static IPs and where technical support is limited to setting reverse DNS, great, they can buy a rack or whatever at the municipal fiber hosting center and sell that service to whoever's interested.
If Comcast or AOL or whoever wants to offer their mega-consumer focused service with dynamic IPs, webmail, coupon offers, ad-injection, great, they can lease a rack, too and sell that.
Plenty of cheapskates and technophobes will pick the consumer service for all the add-ons and technical support and the geeks willing to spend the same or just slightly more for static IP service with none of the bullshit can pick that.
There was a time where a company I knew set themselves up as an ISP choice for DSL. Employees could get DSL from the phone company, choose their employer as their ISP and they had basically a hardwired VPN to work (that solution has some issues in terms of personal-vs-work access, but IIRC from the network guy at that company I talked to they had an entirely separate Internet provider they routed that traffic over). I think whatever setup and operational cost was greatly mitigated by reduced costs related to remote access and the legion of VIPs who wanted their personal ISP bill reimbursed because that "expense" got taken care off at wholesale.
The analogy that makes the most sense is the roads. The city builds 'em, fixes 'em and sets some pretty basic usage rules, but you buy your transportation and delivery services from other companies. If I want a pizza, I pick whoever provides the pizza I want and they just use the road to get it to me.
I think it is worse -- when the police control it, the moral hazard and control issues are pretty obvious.
When a third party controls it, it's more opaque. The police have plausible deniability to say "But we use a third party vendor, we didn't delete that video." The fact that Taser has a financial relationship with police departments is much less clear (to the general public at least) and it's a lot less clear that Taser has a neutral motivation with regard to these videos.
To me, the solution should more likely be that some police oversight entity selects/approves/controls the video storage contract and probably should be contracting with a vendor who doesn't have a specific dependency on the police as a target market. That may be more difficult if regulations regarding these videos lend themselves to market specialization and you end up needing vendors who specialize in those markets.
You'll end up with a similar moral hazard, but at least you'll have reduced the amount of financial influence the police have over the vendors.