That's a tad harsh. I have a 1680x1050 display connected as a third display via a USB-3 adapter and while I didn't expect much, it's worked pretty well for sysadmin tasks. I even occasionally throw full-screen Netflix/HBO/Amazon video on it without any serious problems.
I think the real benefit here isn't gee-whiz cutting edge display technology as much as it is a set of display(s) that are fairly seamless to carry around and use with a laptop to give you a triple head display.
It would be nicer, sure, to have displayport chaining and super high resolution display support but even without that you might get a more useful display resolution than 1366x768 and a pretty seamless mounting and portability setup than existing solutions.
And if they manage to use USB3.1 10 gig, it might lessen any lag effects, although it might be argued that displayport would be the more widely available interface.
I think you would probably make a lot of sacrifices for 252 square feet. That's a square 15 feet on a side, smaller than a standard 2 car garage. My dad lived in a 40 foot motorhome (8 ft x 40 ft) and that's 320 square feet and it felt small when I stayed in it; plus, most everything was motorhome-sized (stove, toilet/bath, etc) and a lot of built-ins & storage efficiencies.
This guy says he has a wife and 3 kids -- I think it might take some religious type orientation to live in a cold climate with 5 people in 250 sq ft of space.
The most bare necessities like a toilet, sink, tub, bed, stove, fridge, table, chairs add up pretty quickly. I didn't dig around enough in his web site to see if there were inside pictures, but I'd be curious to see how its arranged.
My biggest beef is just that the poster was disingenuous -- "I built a stone house for $7k". What he built is smaller than most garages and approaches a large shed in actual size. I'm also skeptical $7k can actually cover building, furnishing and decorating even that small space completely. Maybe if he moved in existing appliances. Maybe if he built all his own case goods. Maybe if the finish materials are like prison-basic (just coating the slab with a gloss topcoat instead of tile or carpet), white paint on the walls, etc
252 square feet is smaller than a lot of New York City apartments. A king size bed alone is 42 square feet.
I do agree that a lot of the "smart house" technology isn't very sustainable, and realtors I've talked to tend to say that it actually makes houses hard to sell.
I suspect, though, that some flavor of smart technology will become more normal at least with regards to electricity. I think improvements in battery capacity, reductions in net metering value and so on will get more people running from mixed power sources, whether it's grid, generators, solar, wind, etc, and an electrical system that understands its power source, available power, charge status, etc will become not unreasonable.
Interesting. How big is it? I didn't see any size estimates (nor did I spider the web site, either) but it looks pretty small -- 20 ft or less on the long side, maybe 10-15 on the short side, call it 300 sq ft. That's extremely small -- the standard size for a two car garage is 400 sq ft.
While it's impressive that you were able to produce an entire house for $7k, had you said "yeah, we build a stone house for $7k and it's only 300 square feet" it would have seemed more realistic.
It almost seems like you leave how small it is out of the "entire house for $7k" claim on purpose to make the brag seem more amazing.
The results of not killing them -- two US soldiers killed, one gravely injured, several killed when a rescue chopper comes under fire and crashes. I couldn't even give you the Taliban body count -- my guess is at least two dozen killed by the 3 SEALs as they tried to escape, another dozen or more killed by a helicopter when it finally rescued the "Lone Survivor".
The results of killing them? Two dead Taliban, the 3 SEALs escape.
And in the annals of military history in any similar situation the two Taliban would have been killed by any scouting party or commandos lest they imperil their mission and escape.
Who builds a house for $7,000? Maybe 50 years ago if you did all the labor yourself and it was a two room affair with no plumbing or running water.
Even a very basic kitchen these days would cost more than that, and that would just be for cabinets, plumbing, electrical a fridge and a stove.
I'd wager that the mortar alone would cost a good chunk of the $7k by itself, if by "stone house" you mean a single floor house built with entirely stone walls to the soffits.
In reality, the only way to fight a war like ISIS is to do what was done to Germany -- level all cities (and all buildings in the city) that even are rumored to have insurgents. Without the commitment to do actual, yucky warfare that completely breaks all resistance... half-ass measures just creates emboldened enemies (think "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!".)
This has been the weakness of the US military since at least Viet Nam and possibly even Korea.
The only way to "win" a war is to defeat the people, not just the army or the fighters. Sure, it's ugly because you kill a lot of people who don't really deserve to die in any conventional moral sense. But not doing it just causes you to lose lives for nothing.
and yet 9999 times of 10000 or more they continue to treat the enemy humanely and frequently place themselves in grater danger to do so.
But do they do it for humanitarian reasons or fear of punishment?
I don't know how true to life it was, but in "Lone Survivor" when the 3 SEALs capture two random Afghanis they have all manner of animated discussion about what to do with them -- if they let them go, they will likely get a whole bunch of Taliban after them, if they kill them or tie them up so they can't get away, they might end up with some kind of war crimes problem.
During their debate, it wasn't "what kind of a humanitarian are you" it was "Do you want to go to Leavenworth for the rest of your life?"
Frankly, I think they probably should have just executed them. It was pretty clear they were aligned with the enemy (one guy was carrying a two-way radio, and I don't think Afghanistan has a CB club) and the results of not killing them were kind of as predicted -- a company-size band of Taliban chasing them down and trying to kill them, succeeding at killing two of them.
It's hard to think of any other military campaign that would have allowed an operation to get compromised like that when snuffing the enemy would have been so effective.
Maybe a better future compromise is a little autoinjector they could carry with a strong dose of a short-acting (eg, 4-6 hours) but powerful sedative/hypnotic. Nighty-night for them and when they wake up, the soldiers are long gone.
Given what's pretty well known about the overlap between FSB/KGB and Russian organized crime, the generally corrupt nature of Russian government and the cronyism in Russian business, it's hard not to see Kaspersky being reticent about talking with a foreign reporter about Russian cybercriminals.
That being said, it may have more subtle influences. Maybe they're in social scenes that overlap? Maybe there's a certain nationalism or national pride going on where they want to talk about something OTHER than the usual narrative of Russian corruption and crime.
The base problem I have with Kaspersky is that given what we know about money-grubbing American corporations and their willingness to cave to the security apparatus, how does Kaspersky operate in Russia without caving or being strongarmed by the government, criminals, or worse?
Yelp would have to want to deal with fraudulent reviewers -- and I think we've seen some claims or evidence that Yelp uses negative reviews, perhaps even dishonest ones as a "sales incentive", so they may not want to....but if they wanted to, they could require reviewers to "check in" at the business (using GPS locating to ensure the customer was actually at the business) within X days of visiting the business to write a review which would then be flagged as "VERIFIED CUSTOMER" kind of the same way Amazon tags reviews as "VERIFIED PURCHASE" so that the person reviewing is identified as having actually bought the product from Amazon.
Now, there's a whole host of businesses where you aren't ever at their place of business (like a remodeling company or other home services) or you don't want to check in (ie, a doctor's office or something). Maybe those businesses could give out a "Yelp integrity code" that could be entered in for customers to validate their customer status when they wrote a review. Crooked companies may not give it out to avoid verified bad reviews, but I think generally speaking companies would have an incentive to want verified customer reviews versus just random reviews by people who weren't customers or maybe even made a mistake and reviewed the wrong business.
I think all of this would be easier if there was some sense that Yelp actually cared about the integrity of reviews. Obviously some kind of integrity checking (were you really a customer?) needs to happen, but if you're Yelp the sheer volume of reviews is part of your business model and making it harder to post reviews (or deprecating unverified reviews) reduces the quantity of reviews which I think many people use as a criteria in and of itself (a 4 star average by 2 reviewers means less than a 3 star average by 100 reviewers).
If you assume Joe's Pizza runs a good business, makes a decent product and generally treats his customers well, how can one reviewer with an ideological axe to grind ruin his business by posting a negative review? Wouldn't a preponderance of otherwise favorable reviews drown the cranks out?
Sure, one person with a serious problem can go nuts trying to ruin a business in many ways but not by writing one or two reviews.
I think a lot of time these complaints against review sites are by BAD businesses that aren't well liked trying to drown out negative reviews like an Orwellian Memory Hole.
I think silver has been a reasonable competitor to gold as a commodity metal. The Romans used it, I'm pretty sure the Pound Sterling is called that for a reason, the Americans used it, etc.
It was probably because its much lower scarcity that it was used as "change" versus higher denomination/value coinage made from gold.
Tell me about the time in the last 2500 years when gold wasn't valuable.
It has a value which has fluctuated over time, but it never seems to become valueless, either because of its history as a means of exchange, its intrinsic value as a material, or both.
I think I've run into a couple of dystopian stories which involve a resurgence of coal usage.
Some are kind of post-ecological failure, where the population lives in domed cities and is energy dependent to keep the domes functioning. I think one involved a crisis several years into a continent-wide drought that required a massive desalination and pumping project to prevent literally running out of water.
I kind of wanted it to go up in flames not because I think ACA was perhaps one of the worst economic giveaways since the Pacific Railroad Acts of the 1860s.
Basically we just ended up enshrining the for-profit healthcare industry, including the insurance companies, into law, forever. Sure, there were some goodies in there for people with pre-existing conditions and a handful of other things, but my sense is that it really didn't do anything to address the out-of-control costs of healthcare or the relentless profiteering WITHIN healthcare.
Unfortunately I don't think any of this can be fixed without going single payer and greatly stripping the profiteering out of healthcare by making most of it nonprofit.
ACA just says "well, we're just going to make more people buy healthcare and hope it makes it cheaper because a bunch of healthy people won't use it" without even beginning to address all the people who WILL use it more now (thanks to some of the goodies) at the current, high-profit, high-cost expense levels.
I wonder if that's a case of misleading by proportion.
It reduces the nonfunctional material in the battery by 80%, but what portion of the battery is nonfunctional material?
If a 100kg battery has 5kg nonfunctional material, losing 80% of it is nice, but you're only losing 4% of the total mass. The same kind of thing goes for volume. If the battery is 1000cc and the nonfunctional material is 50cc, losing 80% is great but its a much smaller part of the entire volume.
I'd guess that this is why the bigger claims are from process improvement. If it meaningfully shrunk mass and volume, they'd probably wave that flag, too.
Eventually being Amish is going to be a preferable (without the religion part) way to live. Low tech is future privacy tech.
They'll try to take that away, too, by polling other Amish who claim you aren't Amish.
Although generally it's an interesting idea, and I wonder if anyone has actually tried "becoming Amish" (without actually being Amish) as a way of going off the grid in a way that doesn't draw attention because it fits some "known" role of people living off the grid.
The p2p element seems reasonable but I suspect would be kind of thorny. Most people's broadband connections are asymmetric, with upload speeds only a fraction of download, so you'd have to limit total upload bandwidth to something small enough that it wouldn't prove obnoxious, either to performance or that would cause users to hit caps, especially the kind they didn't know they had.
And then there's the question of figuring out who has the content on my download list -- even though the streaming catalog is kind of finite, it may prove less efficient or reliable to grab content on my list from random sources whose connectivity to me is unreliable.
The other idea that I had that I thought might solve some of the content owner objections is a download that is a fractional download -- download only half the content, so that you still stream the other half but have the streamed content and the local content interwoven so you grab byte 1 from netflix, 2 from cache, 3 from netflix, etc, so that the local content was "incomplete" and thus didn't fit any strict definition of "local content".
Realtime streaming is a bandwidth pig, but if you had something with 128 GB of storage you could download content in the background at a much lower bandwidth rate. 128kbps, 12 hours a day for a week would give you 300 gigs of offline content.
Netflix could do this with your "My List" of titles and possibly interweave this with some predicted preference stuff and maybe catch a percentage of things you might watch while just browsing (er, vainly searching for something interesting).
At this point you could possibly be watching most of your stuff offline from cache without the need for real time streaming or bandwidth.
I think I've read Netflix say "we'll never do offline streaming" and its probably a licensing/rights issue, although maybe Netflix has some rationale for not doing it to, so that will keep it from happening.
Most STBs and smart TVs don't have storage, but it doesn't seem like adding some flash capability (internally at assembly, or via USB sticks by consumers) would be that expensive.
But it's naive in the extreme to believe that some kind of informal system of first come, first served meets squatter's rights would prevail when the players in question are large commercial entities.
The Internet as we knew it 15 years ago (or more..) is dead, as is the benevolent giant of Google. It's not run by geeks for geeks under some informal geek code of honor anymore. It's a commercial marketplace run by corporations for a profit.
And anyone with a clue and any exposure to Google would have to understand that their services and systems change as they see fit. If you rely on Google for anything, you'd better be, as the MBAs say, nimble and able to pivot when they change their minds. Their services come and go. Beta, labs, products, whatever, if it's not making ad revenue it's on life support and will disappear whenever they feel like it.
I think local donations is a great idea. So many local organizations are the ones actually executing hands-on help where the amount of useful work done per dollar is higher than larger organizations that have larger administrative overhead.
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That's a tad harsh. I have a 1680x1050 display connected as a third display via a USB-3 adapter and while I didn't expect much, it's worked pretty well for sysadmin tasks. I even occasionally throw full-screen Netflix/HBO/Amazon video on it without any serious problems.
I think the real benefit here isn't gee-whiz cutting edge display technology as much as it is a set of display(s) that are fairly seamless to carry around and use with a laptop to give you a triple head display.
It would be nicer, sure, to have displayport chaining and super high resolution display support but even without that you might get a more useful display resolution than 1366x768 and a pretty seamless mounting and portability setup than existing solutions.
And if they manage to use USB3.1 10 gig, it might lessen any lag effects, although it might be argued that displayport would be the more widely available interface.
I think you would probably make a lot of sacrifices for 252 square feet. That's a square 15 feet on a side, smaller than a standard 2 car garage. My dad lived in a 40 foot motorhome (8 ft x 40 ft) and that's 320 square feet and it felt small when I stayed in it; plus, most everything was motorhome-sized (stove, toilet/bath, etc) and a lot of built-ins & storage efficiencies.
This guy says he has a wife and 3 kids -- I think it might take some religious type orientation to live in a cold climate with 5 people in 250 sq ft of space.
The most bare necessities like a toilet, sink, tub, bed, stove, fridge, table, chairs add up pretty quickly. I didn't dig around enough in his web site to see if there were inside pictures, but I'd be curious to see how its arranged.
My biggest beef is just that the poster was disingenuous -- "I built a stone house for $7k". What he built is smaller than most garages and approaches a large shed in actual size. I'm also skeptical $7k can actually cover building, furnishing and decorating even that small space completely. Maybe if he moved in existing appliances. Maybe if he built all his own case goods. Maybe if the finish materials are like prison-basic (just coating the slab with a gloss topcoat instead of tile or carpet), white paint on the walls, etc
252 square feet is smaller than a lot of New York City apartments. A king size bed alone is 42 square feet.
I do agree that a lot of the "smart house" technology isn't very sustainable, and realtors I've talked to tend to say that it actually makes houses hard to sell.
I suspect, though, that some flavor of smart technology will become more normal at least with regards to electricity. I think improvements in battery capacity, reductions in net metering value and so on will get more people running from mixed power sources, whether it's grid, generators, solar, wind, etc, and an electrical system that understands its power source, available power, charge status, etc will become not unreasonable.
Interesting. How big is it? I didn't see any size estimates (nor did I spider the web site, either) but it looks pretty small -- 20 ft or less on the long side, maybe 10-15 on the short side, call it 300 sq ft. That's extremely small -- the standard size for a two car garage is 400 sq ft.
While it's impressive that you were able to produce an entire house for $7k, had you said "yeah, we build a stone house for $7k and it's only 300 square feet" it would have seemed more realistic.
It almost seems like you leave how small it is out of the "entire house for $7k" claim on purpose to make the brag seem more amazing.
The results of not killing them -- two US soldiers killed, one gravely injured, several killed when a rescue chopper comes under fire and crashes. I couldn't even give you the Taliban body count -- my guess is at least two dozen killed by the 3 SEALs as they tried to escape, another dozen or more killed by a helicopter when it finally rescued the "Lone Survivor".
The results of killing them? Two dead Taliban, the 3 SEALs escape.
And in the annals of military history in any similar situation the two Taliban would have been killed by any scouting party or commandos lest they imperil their mission and escape.
It's interesting how you only say "I did it" without explaining how you did it.
Most cost estimating uses ~$100/sq ft for residential properties, which would make your stone house 70 sq. ft.
Provide some facts -- finished square feet, internal materials and features, cost of land, etc, otherwise I have to remain skeptical.
Who builds a house for $7,000? Maybe 50 years ago if you did all the labor yourself and it was a two room affair with no plumbing or running water.
Even a very basic kitchen these days would cost more than that, and that would just be for cabinets, plumbing, electrical a fridge and a stove.
I'd wager that the mortar alone would cost a good chunk of the $7k by itself, if by "stone house" you mean a single floor house built with entirely stone walls to the soffits.
In reality, the only way to fight a war like ISIS is to do what was done to Germany -- level all cities (and all buildings in the city) that even are rumored to have insurgents. Without the commitment to do actual, yucky warfare that completely breaks all resistance... half-ass measures just creates emboldened enemies (think "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!".)
This has been the weakness of the US military since at least Viet Nam and possibly even Korea.
The only way to "win" a war is to defeat the people, not just the army or the fighters. Sure, it's ugly because you kill a lot of people who don't really deserve to die in any conventional moral sense. But not doing it just causes you to lose lives for nothing.
and yet 9999 times of 10000 or more they continue to treat the enemy humanely and frequently place themselves in grater danger to do so.
But do they do it for humanitarian reasons or fear of punishment?
I don't know how true to life it was, but in "Lone Survivor" when the 3 SEALs capture two random Afghanis they have all manner of animated discussion about what to do with them -- if they let them go, they will likely get a whole bunch of Taliban after them, if they kill them or tie them up so they can't get away, they might end up with some kind of war crimes problem.
During their debate, it wasn't "what kind of a humanitarian are you" it was "Do you want to go to Leavenworth for the rest of your life?"
Frankly, I think they probably should have just executed them. It was pretty clear they were aligned with the enemy (one guy was carrying a two-way radio, and I don't think Afghanistan has a CB club) and the results of not killing them were kind of as predicted -- a company-size band of Taliban chasing them down and trying to kill them, succeeding at killing two of them.
It's hard to think of any other military campaign that would have allowed an operation to get compromised like that when snuffing the enemy would have been so effective.
Maybe a better future compromise is a little autoinjector they could carry with a strong dose of a short-acting (eg, 4-6 hours) but powerful sedative/hypnotic. Nighty-night for them and when they wake up, the soldiers are long gone.
Given what's pretty well known about the overlap between FSB/KGB and Russian organized crime, the generally corrupt nature of Russian government and the cronyism in Russian business, it's hard not to see Kaspersky being reticent about talking with a foreign reporter about Russian cybercriminals.
That being said, it may have more subtle influences. Maybe they're in social scenes that overlap? Maybe there's a certain nationalism or national pride going on where they want to talk about something OTHER than the usual narrative of Russian corruption and crime.
The base problem I have with Kaspersky is that given what we know about money-grubbing American corporations and their willingness to cave to the security apparatus, how does Kaspersky operate in Russia without caving or being strongarmed by the government, criminals, or worse?
Yelp would have to want to deal with fraudulent reviewers -- and I think we've seen some claims or evidence that Yelp uses negative reviews, perhaps even dishonest ones as a "sales incentive", so they may not want to.. ..but if they wanted to, they could require reviewers to "check in" at the business (using GPS locating to ensure the customer was actually at the business) within X days of visiting the business to write a review which would then be flagged as "VERIFIED CUSTOMER" kind of the same way Amazon tags reviews as "VERIFIED PURCHASE" so that the person reviewing is identified as having actually bought the product from Amazon.
Now, there's a whole host of businesses where you aren't ever at their place of business (like a remodeling company or other home services) or you don't want to check in (ie, a doctor's office or something). Maybe those businesses could give out a "Yelp integrity code" that could be entered in for customers to validate their customer status when they wrote a review. Crooked companies may not give it out to avoid verified bad reviews, but I think generally speaking companies would have an incentive to want verified customer reviews versus just random reviews by people who weren't customers or maybe even made a mistake and reviewed the wrong business.
I think all of this would be easier if there was some sense that Yelp actually cared about the integrity of reviews. Obviously some kind of integrity checking (were you really a customer?) needs to happen, but if you're Yelp the sheer volume of reviews is part of your business model and making it harder to post reviews (or deprecating unverified reviews) reduces the quantity of reviews which I think many people use as a criteria in and of itself (a 4 star average by 2 reviewers means less than a 3 star average by 100 reviewers).
Whatever happened to the marketplace of ideas?
If you assume Joe's Pizza runs a good business, makes a decent product and generally treats his customers well, how can one reviewer with an ideological axe to grind ruin his business by posting a negative review? Wouldn't a preponderance of otherwise favorable reviews drown the cranks out?
Sure, one person with a serious problem can go nuts trying to ruin a business in many ways but not by writing one or two reviews.
I think a lot of time these complaints against review sites are by BAD businesses that aren't well liked trying to drown out negative reviews like an Orwellian Memory Hole.
I guess if estimates say 5% of fuel, but...
- half or more of flights are in the winter, when there are no bugs or a lot less of them.
- most flights spend most of their time at bug free altitudes.
- many airports are in urban areas with reduced bug populations
Is this mostly a small plane phenomenon?
I think silver has been a reasonable competitor to gold as a commodity metal. The Romans used it, I'm pretty sure the Pound Sterling is called that for a reason, the Americans used it, etc.
It was probably because its much lower scarcity that it was used as "change" versus higher denomination/value coinage made from gold.
Tell me about the time in the last 2500 years when gold wasn't valuable.
It has a value which has fluctuated over time, but it never seems to become valueless, either because of its history as a means of exchange, its intrinsic value as a material, or both.
I think I've run into a couple of dystopian stories which involve a resurgence of coal usage.
Some are kind of post-ecological failure, where the population lives in domed cities and is energy dependent to keep the domes functioning. I think one involved a crisis several years into a continent-wide drought that required a massive desalination and pumping project to prevent literally running out of water.
It's the preferred location for exiling troublesome political figures with French ties.
I kind of wanted it to go up in flames not because I think ACA was perhaps one of the worst economic giveaways since the Pacific Railroad Acts of the 1860s.
Basically we just ended up enshrining the for-profit healthcare industry, including the insurance companies, into law, forever. Sure, there were some goodies in there for people with pre-existing conditions and a handful of other things, but my sense is that it really didn't do anything to address the out-of-control costs of healthcare or the relentless profiteering WITHIN healthcare.
Unfortunately I don't think any of this can be fixed without going single payer and greatly stripping the profiteering out of healthcare by making most of it nonprofit.
ACA just says "well, we're just going to make more people buy healthcare and hope it makes it cheaper because a bunch of healthy people won't use it" without even beginning to address all the people who WILL use it more now (thanks to some of the goodies) at the current, high-profit, high-cost expense levels.
I wonder if that's a case of misleading by proportion.
It reduces the nonfunctional material in the battery by 80%, but what portion of the battery is nonfunctional material?
If a 100kg battery has 5kg nonfunctional material, losing 80% of it is nice, but you're only losing 4% of the total mass. The same kind of thing goes for volume. If the battery is 1000cc and the nonfunctional material is 50cc, losing 80% is great but its a much smaller part of the entire volume.
I'd guess that this is why the bigger claims are from process improvement. If it meaningfully shrunk mass and volume, they'd probably wave that flag, too.
Where did you buy it?
Also, I assume the battery has some kind of charge controller integrated into it so that it was a direct replacement for a regular lead acid battery.
Eventually being Amish is going to be a preferable (without the religion part) way to live. Low tech is future privacy tech.
They'll try to take that away, too, by polling other Amish who claim you aren't Amish.
Although generally it's an interesting idea, and I wonder if anyone has actually tried "becoming Amish" (without actually being Amish) as a way of going off the grid in a way that doesn't draw attention because it fits some "known" role of people living off the grid.
The p2p element seems reasonable but I suspect would be kind of thorny. Most people's broadband connections are asymmetric, with upload speeds only a fraction of download, so you'd have to limit total upload bandwidth to something small enough that it wouldn't prove obnoxious, either to performance or that would cause users to hit caps, especially the kind they didn't know they had.
And then there's the question of figuring out who has the content on my download list -- even though the streaming catalog is kind of finite, it may prove less efficient or reliable to grab content on my list from random sources whose connectivity to me is unreliable.
The other idea that I had that I thought might solve some of the content owner objections is a download that is a fractional download -- download only half the content, so that you still stream the other half but have the streamed content and the local content interwoven so you grab byte 1 from netflix, 2 from cache, 3 from netflix, etc, so that the local content was "incomplete" and thus didn't fit any strict definition of "local content".
Realtime streaming is a bandwidth pig, but if you had something with 128 GB of storage you could download content in the background at a much lower bandwidth rate. 128kbps, 12 hours a day for a week would give you 300 gigs of offline content.
Netflix could do this with your "My List" of titles and possibly interweave this with some predicted preference stuff and maybe catch a percentage of things you might watch while just browsing (er, vainly searching for something interesting).
At this point you could possibly be watching most of your stuff offline from cache without the need for real time streaming or bandwidth.
I think I've read Netflix say "we'll never do offline streaming" and its probably a licensing/rights issue, although maybe Netflix has some rationale for not doing it to, so that will keep it from happening.
Most STBs and smart TVs don't have storage, but it doesn't seem like adding some flash capability (internally at assembly, or via USB sticks by consumers) would be that expensive.
But it's naive in the extreme to believe that some kind of informal system of first come, first served meets squatter's rights would prevail when the players in question are large commercial entities.
The Internet as we knew it 15 years ago (or more..) is dead, as is the benevolent giant of Google. It's not run by geeks for geeks under some informal geek code of honor anymore. It's a commercial marketplace run by corporations for a profit.
And anyone with a clue and any exposure to Google would have to understand that their services and systems change as they see fit. If you rely on Google for anything, you'd better be, as the MBAs say, nimble and able to pivot when they change their minds. Their services come and go. Beta, labs, products, whatever, if it's not making ad revenue it's on life support and will disappear whenever they feel like it.
I think local donations is a great idea. So many local organizations are the ones actually executing hands-on help where the amount of useful work done per dollar is higher than larger organizations that have larger administrative overhead.