Every time I hear about peak oil as a concept it gets turned into the idea we'll just run out, all at once.
Why won't the pricing mechanism of markets just raise the price over time and slow consumption, or increase the use of alternatives where they exist, increase research into improving or finding new alternatives? It will also affect choices, so as food prices increase because of fertilizer price increases people will choose food over, say, power boats.
Fracking is kind of the great example as well. AFAIK it was a known technique but not economically viable. As prices increased it was improved as a process and put into use because it was more economically viable at higher price levels.
I have read some arguments that claim significant economic disruption as oil prices cross a certain threshold creating an amplification effect. I think one example is the use of trucks for transportation -- the cost of shipping increases it makes other activities dependent on trucking not economically viable as the transportation costs exceed the marginal value of the thing being transported. I buy this, sort of, but it doesn't take into account the adaptation of the use of localized production or alternative products being used.
Overall I buy the idea that oil is a limited resource, but find the predictions of its increasing scarcity a lot less due to the complexity and sophistication of economies.
But the US has a pretty healthy presence of Russian mafia which no doubt has connections in Russia and the east bloc, so they wouldn't have to send some guy on a plane if they took out a contract on him.
The other angle is the shadowy nexus of Russian FSB and Russian organized crime, ex-KGB involvement in organized crime here and abroad. What if his exposes reach someone connected to the FSB? That could have repercussions with some very scary and very capable kinds of people.
From what I've seen, though, the kinds of people he exposes look pretty small-time in terms of connections.
There sure seems to be a gold rush mentality on metadata, and while some of it, like financial transactions or phone logs seems like it would be valuable to some people, some of the metadata grabbing seems kind of like fool's gold.
Maybe I'm just too thick to see how valuable all of it is, but at some point I wonder if maybe people are linking metadata together and reaching the conclusions they want to reach and not actually finding something that's really there, like getting a connect-the-dots picture with no numbers and just drawing your own lines and saying "Look what the picture is!"
I'm less concerned with stuff like the battery or other kinds of hardware engineering questions.
When it was new, the idea of a non-replaceable battery seemed dumb, but having owned 4 iPhones since and two iPads, it doesn't really seem to matter and frankly it's just as easy/convenient to carry a spare generic USB charging battery as it would be a phone battery if I'm doing the kind of traveling where I will be away from power and worried about depleting my battery. Every other use case seems to be covered by access to power of some kind -- in the car, at a computer, wall jack etc.
My interest is in the broader usability of the iPhone or iPad for other tasks.
1) I/O through lightning port -- why is this so controlled or limited? Apple should encourage all kinds of connectivity solutions, including USB peripherals.
2) Bluetooth mouse pairing -- why is this deliberately excluded, especially from the iPad? I guess maybe I can see apple not wanting to allow it or not want to program mouse movements or mouse-only widgets in their general UI, but maybe consider allowing the device to be paired so its usable in other apps like games or a remote desktop application? I could get miles more out of my iPad as an RDP client with a mouse.
There's just all kinds of little things like that the Apple seems to block for reasons that don't make sense.
It seems to me the lightning connector, for all of its mechanical advantages over the 30 pin, also came with a lot of new restrictions and complications, all designed to keep Apple in control.
It seems to me that they're stifling innovative uses via third party accessories which seems to encourage people to find other platforms which could ultimately shrink their user base.
It's just one example, but in a lot of ways I would think they would want to encourage the iPhone/iPad as more general purpose devices with other interesting connectivity and expansion options.
> Other ISPs are putting all new customers behind CGN unless they pay an extra fee for a static IP address.
Isn't this basically market forces at work? A scarce commodity being rationed via pricing?
I don't know, but I would guess that the IPv4 address situation is probably largely solvable via pricing for static IPs and blocks. I'm sure there are technical issues related to making connections static or dynamic as-needed and maybe carrier-side NAT performance issues or other infrastructure demands.
It strikes me there's a lot of static space out there wasted and hoarded because there's no price (or very little price) associated with it.
I've read a number of news articles where the process law was misused by collections agencies, basically turning criminal law into a tool for civil collections.
The collections agencies were misrepresenting having notified people who owed small-time debts and managing to get bench warrants issued for not showing up to civil court. So when these people have a minor law enforcement contact, the warrant shows up and off to jail they go.
I had a client with a 50/10 package at two sites on the same property and we connected them with a VPN. Never could get more than 2 Mbps between sites, despite the VPN devices rated for multiple 10+ Mbps simultaneous IPSec tunnels (new models, crypto accelerators, etc). I should have been seeing 7+ but that fact that two nodes on the same head couldn't do it leads me to believe there's something broken or inherently dishonest about the advertised rates.
I think if there was some kind of audit where you looked at the upstream connectivity of every cable subscriber you would find a fair number where either the area head end had less actual capacity than what they were selling to end users or where the utilization and oversubscription essentially made it impossible to see the advertised speed.
I know they cover themselves with fine print and asterisks on their offers, but it does seem like it is functionally false advertising.
You're right. I seem to remember there was a time when the History channel or Discovery were actually interesting, with decent documentary programming that actually matched their name. The was more or less true of Bravo and other, earlier "genre" cable channels. Oddly enough the channel that was more or less synonymous with cable TV, MTV, seems like it was one of the first cable channels to abandon its eponymous content for junk content.
Now they all seem to have some variation on the reality show and the name of the channel has nothing to do with their content. And most of the new genre channels seem to be mere facades and never really had a period where they more or less matched their name and their content.
I think getting a Tivo in 2002 helped drive my discontent with cable. It let me focus on content I wanted and made me a lot less satisfied with channel surfing, which became less and less a way of finding something entertaining.
We switched to the most basic cable subscription six months ago and I don't really miss any of it. I bought this season of "Justified" on Amazon but that's easily covered by the $70 a month I save. I'm a Comcast customer so I'm probably in their crosshairs for a rate hike, but our Internet is billed seperately through Comcast Business and I wonder if that might somehow insulate us from residential rate hikes.
Despite being big in that market as well, I think business Internet has competitiveness associated with it that might inhibit price increaes. In my SMB consulting I see a lot of SMBs try to one-stop-shop phone and Internet with CLECs that do phone systems as well as SMBs in big buildings/downtowns have reasonably priced fiber-based service that gives them cable speeds. In this market Comcast has to lowball prices to stay competitive since their speeds don't have the consistency and SLA-like delivery that ILEC/CLEC fiber service has and there's no TV to use as a bargaining chip.
I think farm work traditionally has long days during planting and harvest periods, but in between is a lot less time intensive than we think. I don't think there's a shortage of work to be done in between, but a lot of it is dependent on daylight. You just can't get much done in a field in the dark.
In climates with anything approaching winter, there's even less to be done. Livestock may need tending, cows need milking, but there's no field or garden work to be done. I think a lot of winter work now involves machine maintenance.
And I'm sure there's a lot of variation depending on the era; technology substantially changes the labor equation.
I don't doubt there are people (young, single, apartment renters) who spend 60 hours a week at work, but I suspect that all those 60 hours aren't spent actually producing a work product.
There's a lot of time spent in IT waiting. Waiting for builds. Waiting for downloads. Waiting for installs, updates, restores, data transfer from box A to box B. And waiting is just one category -- there's yakking with co-workers, Google searches for work-related information that end up in some Wikipedia page 6 times removed from what you started looking for. Trips to the cafeteria, vending machines, smoking cigarettes.
I think for a lot of people with few strings attached work just becomes a place to be when they have nothing else to do. It's especially easy for technology people because a lot of them would be doing the same thing at home they'd do at work but it's less lonely in the office.
There's the default way -- self-absorbed managers deliberately ignoring and not understanding security warnings, wanting to keep earning bonuses for all the money they saved, etc.
Then there's the alternate explanation, IT security people seeing threats without any conclusive proof, wanting to spend a metric ton of money, expand their empire and cause a bunch of disruption that might not even accomplish anything but create chaos and complexity.
I've seen both. It's easy to see how this could be a combination of both with neither side really able to claim they were right. While there were obviously security problems, were these specific vectors the ones the security people saw? Or did they want to go on some kind of fishing expedition with little to show for it or implement a bunch of costly changes "because security"?
While management is easy to caricature as self-serving and incompetent, Target is generally a well-run company and it's hard to see their management purposefully ignoring concrete security weaknesses that could cost them maybe billions.
My guess is its probably a long-term case of all of the above. Too many managers exposed to 3Li73 53CUrI7y who just made things difficult with no concrete improvements or any attempt at usability and too many hard-working IT/security people who put up with managers that cover for weak security simply because they don't understand it and don't want to spend the money to fix it because it will either cost them personally or professionally.
At one time, a college education was, or was almost, free. How did we do it?
We also had a college system that was principally focused on education, not on a broad range of social welfare goals and without the bureaucratic empire builders.
There is something about the wants of the super rich that appears limitless and never satisfied. It's not enough to own a home, it has to be a big home, with lots of luxury details, lots of land, expensive upkeep. And it's not enough to own one, you have to have more than one. And then you need a plane, and not just any plane, but a plane that can fly transcontinental distances.
The level of even "sort of rich" standards today would be "fabulously rich" by 19th century standards.
I don't know that I consider myself an advocate for that kind of socio-economic restructuring, but as I understand the arguments, there's some kind of hand-waving arguments that argue that when you eliminate a lot of mechanized transport you eliminate most demand/need for many "advanced" materials like carbon fiber.
There's also some arguments made that some kinds of concentrated economic activity and trade will still happen, just on a much smaller scale to due to reduced demand.
I don't really buy it much, but then again, when I look at what we're doing now and think about how long we can sustain it, I'm not sure I buy that, either.
I think you're right but I think the principal problem is population growth.
It seems to me that most of our problems are driven by the excess billions of people we support.
There are a fair number of people who advocate a more off the grid approach, with a lot of emphasis on localized, smaller scale agriculture and light industry.
Basically you spend half your time on small-scale agriculture and the rest on local light industry. This removes a lot of the transportation and mass production for a consumer economy energy consumption.
The downside is you live like it's 1850, and I'm not sure how readily I'm willing to give up modern medicine.
The article places blame on natural gas drilling and production for methane leaks, saying it negates the emissions advantages of using it as a transportation fuel.
So we only use it as a transportation fuel, and abiding the wisdom of this study we will stop producing it, since it isn't used for heating homes, as an industrial fuel or used in power plants?
I would guess that vehicle fueling is the smallest category of use of natural gas and even if we abandoned it totally as a vehicle fuel it would not change the amount of natural gas produced. So going back to diesel in all the vehicles that now use it would be a net gain in greenhouse gas production, since there would be almost no change in methane leaks from gas production.
I sometimes think this is due to the paramilitary, authoritarian nature of law enforcement, with all of its military-style ranks, commands, etc.
There seems to be something about those kinds of organizations that is always inclined to hide and cover up mistakes than to admit a simple mistake and make amends for it. The organizations seem highly punitive internally, with a low tolerance for errors. They also seem to look at making mistakes or at least admitting to them as somehow undermining their authority, as if their authority only works if they are always right.
I'd also imagine in a case like the no-fly list there are a lot of top-down orders that the list is always right, and if there are questions, see rule #1.
On one hand, you have a set of "rational" social values regarding going to college, being a moral, law abiding person, working hard, etc. all leading to good outcomes and yet none of it seems true anymore -- the plutocracy steals with impunity, working hard doesn't produce any rewards, college leads to lifelong indebtedness, etc.
On the other, you have an economy that never seems to get better for anyone but the rich, an environment that at best produces strange weather and otherwise is nothing but bad news, never ending military conflicts, etc.
It does sound like a common pretext to abandon science and reason and escape into religion.
I don't know how they can get months of standby time on a charge without "sleeping" the 802.11 connection and reconnecting. Maintaining a continuous wifi connection would kill the batteries in hours, not months like they claim.
Airlines don't make any money on your mobile phone calls, that's the difference and that's why we really had this "debate" to begin with.
Once the FAA finally caved in to reason and the fact that planes weren't regularly falling out of the sky due to cell phones being left on, it left the door open ever so slightly to the idea that a captive customer base might somehow start getting free stuff that the airline could otherwise make money on.
Fortunately for them they were able to prod enough columnists and astroturfers into creating a "zOMG cellphones!" controversy that everyone was "opposed" to, guaranteeing crusading congressional "leaders" a chance to enshrine a voice call monopoly into law.
The doorbot looks pretty cool. I hate getting up to see if the person ringing the door is someone I want to answer the door for (like my son's friends when he's not home, morons ignoring my no soliciting sign, etc).
One thing I couldn't tell was whether it was possible to query the doorbot's camera arbitrarily without having someone necessarily ring the doorbell. I suppose not for power management reasons, although the power management angle makes me wonder how long it takes between someone pressing the door bot button and getting a notification. I'm guessing the device has to warm boot, including making an 802.11 connection, which seems like it could add a delay.
I've only been to Las Vegas 5 times in the past 8 years and have always waited over a half hour, usually closer to an hour. I've usually landed between 7 PM and Midnight and the line for the cabs is ridiculous. There's no shortage of cabs, but they can only load so many people so fast.
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Every time I hear about peak oil as a concept it gets turned into the idea we'll just run out, all at once.
Why won't the pricing mechanism of markets just raise the price over time and slow consumption, or increase the use of alternatives where they exist, increase research into improving or finding new alternatives? It will also affect choices, so as food prices increase because of fertilizer price increases people will choose food over, say, power boats.
Fracking is kind of the great example as well. AFAIK it was a known technique but not economically viable. As prices increased it was improved as a process and put into use because it was more economically viable at higher price levels.
I have read some arguments that claim significant economic disruption as oil prices cross a certain threshold creating an amplification effect. I think one example is the use of trucks for transportation -- the cost of shipping increases it makes other activities dependent on trucking not economically viable as the transportation costs exceed the marginal value of the thing being transported. I buy this, sort of, but it doesn't take into account the adaptation of the use of localized production or alternative products being used.
Overall I buy the idea that oil is a limited resource, but find the predictions of its increasing scarcity a lot less due to the complexity and sophistication of economies.
That would be my first thought, too.
But the US has a pretty healthy presence of Russian mafia which no doubt has connections in Russia and the east bloc, so they wouldn't have to send some guy on a plane if they took out a contract on him.
The other angle is the shadowy nexus of Russian FSB and Russian organized crime, ex-KGB involvement in organized crime here and abroad. What if his exposes reach someone connected to the FSB? That could have repercussions with some very scary and very capable kinds of people.
From what I've seen, though, the kinds of people he exposes look pretty small-time in terms of connections.
There sure seems to be a gold rush mentality on metadata, and while some of it, like financial transactions or phone logs seems like it would be valuable to some people, some of the metadata grabbing seems kind of like fool's gold.
Maybe I'm just too thick to see how valuable all of it is, but at some point I wonder if maybe people are linking metadata together and reaching the conclusions they want to reach and not actually finding something that's really there, like getting a connect-the-dots picture with no numbers and just drawing your own lines and saying "Look what the picture is!"
I'm less concerned with stuff like the battery or other kinds of hardware engineering questions.
When it was new, the idea of a non-replaceable battery seemed dumb, but having owned 4 iPhones since and two iPads, it doesn't really seem to matter and frankly it's just as easy/convenient to carry a spare generic USB charging battery as it would be a phone battery if I'm doing the kind of traveling where I will be away from power and worried about depleting my battery. Every other use case seems to be covered by access to power of some kind -- in the car, at a computer, wall jack etc.
My interest is in the broader usability of the iPhone or iPad for other tasks.
1) I/O through lightning port -- why is this so controlled or limited? Apple should encourage all kinds of connectivity solutions, including USB peripherals.
2) Bluetooth mouse pairing -- why is this deliberately excluded, especially from the iPad? I guess maybe I can see apple not wanting to allow it or not want to program mouse movements or mouse-only widgets in their general UI, but maybe consider allowing the device to be paired so its usable in other apps like games or a remote desktop application? I could get miles more out of my iPad as an RDP client with a mouse.
There's just all kinds of little things like that the Apple seems to block for reasons that don't make sense.
It seems to me the lightning connector, for all of its mechanical advantages over the 30 pin, also came with a lot of new restrictions and complications, all designed to keep Apple in control.
It seems to me that they're stifling innovative uses via third party accessories which seems to encourage people to find other platforms which could ultimately shrink their user base.
It's just one example, but in a lot of ways I would think they would want to encourage the iPhone/iPad as more general purpose devices with other interesting connectivity and expansion options.
> Other ISPs are putting all new customers behind CGN unless they pay an extra fee for a static IP address.
Isn't this basically market forces at work? A scarce commodity being rationed via pricing?
I don't know, but I would guess that the IPv4 address situation is probably largely solvable via pricing for static IPs and blocks. I'm sure there are technical issues related to making connections static or dynamic as-needed and maybe carrier-side NAT performance issues or other infrastructure demands.
It strikes me there's a lot of static space out there wasted and hoarded because there's no price (or very little price) associated with it.
I've read a number of news articles where the process law was misused by collections agencies, basically turning criminal law into a tool for civil collections.
The collections agencies were misrepresenting having notified people who owed small-time debts and managing to get bench warrants issued for not showing up to civil court. So when these people have a minor law enforcement contact, the warrant shows up and off to jail they go.
I had a client with a 50/10 package at two sites on the same property and we connected them with a VPN. Never could get more than 2 Mbps between sites, despite the VPN devices rated for multiple 10+ Mbps simultaneous IPSec tunnels (new models, crypto accelerators, etc). I should have been seeing 7+ but that fact that two nodes on the same head couldn't do it leads me to believe there's something broken or inherently dishonest about the advertised rates.
I think if there was some kind of audit where you looked at the upstream connectivity of every cable subscriber you would find a fair number where either the area head end had less actual capacity than what they were selling to end users or where the utilization and oversubscription essentially made it impossible to see the advertised speed.
I know they cover themselves with fine print and asterisks on their offers, but it does seem like it is functionally false advertising.
You're right. I seem to remember there was a time when the History channel or Discovery were actually interesting, with decent documentary programming that actually matched their name. The was more or less true of Bravo and other, earlier "genre" cable channels. Oddly enough the channel that was more or less synonymous with cable TV, MTV, seems like it was one of the first cable channels to abandon its eponymous content for junk content.
Now they all seem to have some variation on the reality show and the name of the channel has nothing to do with their content. And most of the new genre channels seem to be mere facades and never really had a period where they more or less matched their name and their content.
I think getting a Tivo in 2002 helped drive my discontent with cable. It let me focus on content I wanted and made me a lot less satisfied with channel surfing, which became less and less a way of finding something entertaining.
We switched to the most basic cable subscription six months ago and I don't really miss any of it. I bought this season of "Justified" on Amazon but that's easily covered by the $70 a month I save. I'm a Comcast customer so I'm probably in their crosshairs for a rate hike, but our Internet is billed seperately through Comcast Business and I wonder if that might somehow insulate us from residential rate hikes.
Despite being big in that market as well, I think business Internet has competitiveness associated with it that might inhibit price increaes. In my SMB consulting I see a lot of SMBs try to one-stop-shop phone and Internet with CLECs that do phone systems as well as SMBs in big buildings/downtowns have reasonably priced fiber-based service that gives them cable speeds. In this market Comcast has to lowball prices to stay competitive since their speeds don't have the consistency and SLA-like delivery that ILEC/CLEC fiber service has and there's no TV to use as a bargaining chip.
I think farm work traditionally has long days during planting and harvest periods, but in between is a lot less time intensive than we think. I don't think there's a shortage of work to be done in between, but a lot of it is dependent on daylight. You just can't get much done in a field in the dark.
In climates with anything approaching winter, there's even less to be done. Livestock may need tending, cows need milking, but there's no field or garden work to be done. I think a lot of winter work now involves machine maintenance.
And I'm sure there's a lot of variation depending on the era; technology substantially changes the labor equation.
I don't doubt there are people (young, single, apartment renters) who spend 60 hours a week at work, but I suspect that all those 60 hours aren't spent actually producing a work product.
There's a lot of time spent in IT waiting. Waiting for builds. Waiting for downloads. Waiting for installs, updates, restores, data transfer from box A to box B. And waiting is just one category -- there's yakking with co-workers, Google searches for work-related information that end up in some Wikipedia page 6 times removed from what you started looking for. Trips to the cafeteria, vending machines, smoking cigarettes.
I think for a lot of people with few strings attached work just becomes a place to be when they have nothing else to do. It's especially easy for technology people because a lot of them would be doing the same thing at home they'd do at work but it's less lonely in the office.
There's the default way -- self-absorbed managers deliberately ignoring and not understanding security warnings, wanting to keep earning bonuses for all the money they saved, etc.
Then there's the alternate explanation, IT security people seeing threats without any conclusive proof, wanting to spend a metric ton of money, expand their empire and cause a bunch of disruption that might not even accomplish anything but create chaos and complexity.
I've seen both. It's easy to see how this could be a combination of both with neither side really able to claim they were right. While there were obviously security problems, were these specific vectors the ones the security people saw? Or did they want to go on some kind of fishing expedition with little to show for it or implement a bunch of costly changes "because security"?
While management is easy to caricature as self-serving and incompetent, Target is generally a well-run company and it's hard to see their management purposefully ignoring concrete security weaknesses that could cost them maybe billions.
My guess is its probably a long-term case of all of the above. Too many managers exposed to 3Li73 53CUrI7y who just made things difficult with no concrete improvements or any attempt at usability and too many hard-working IT/security people who put up with managers that cover for weak security simply because they don't understand it and don't want to spend the money to fix it because it will either cost them personally or professionally.
40% of Americans can't differentiate astrology from astronomy.
When you don't know one of those from the other, what does it matter how you think about their scientific merits?
At one time, a college education was, or was almost, free. How did we do it?
We also had a college system that was principally focused on education, not on a broad range of social welfare goals and without the bureaucratic empire builders.
There is something about the wants of the super rich that appears limitless and never satisfied. It's not enough to own a home, it has to be a big home, with lots of luxury details, lots of land, expensive upkeep. And it's not enough to own one, you have to have more than one. And then you need a plane, and not just any plane, but a plane that can fly transcontinental distances.
The level of even "sort of rich" standards today would be "fabulously rich" by 19th century standards.
I don't know that I consider myself an advocate for that kind of socio-economic restructuring, but as I understand the arguments, there's some kind of hand-waving arguments that argue that when you eliminate a lot of mechanized transport you eliminate most demand/need for many "advanced" materials like carbon fiber.
There's also some arguments made that some kinds of concentrated economic activity and trade will still happen, just on a much smaller scale to due to reduced demand.
I don't really buy it much, but then again, when I look at what we're doing now and think about how long we can sustain it, I'm not sure I buy that, either.
I think you're right but I think the principal problem is population growth.
It seems to me that most of our problems are driven by the excess billions of people we support.
There are a fair number of people who advocate a more off the grid approach, with a lot of emphasis on localized, smaller scale agriculture and light industry.
Basically you spend half your time on small-scale agriculture and the rest on local light industry. This removes a lot of the transportation and mass production for a consumer economy energy consumption.
The downside is you live like it's 1850, and I'm not sure how readily I'm willing to give up modern medicine.
The article places blame on natural gas drilling and production for methane leaks, saying it negates the emissions advantages of using it as a transportation fuel.
So we only use it as a transportation fuel, and abiding the wisdom of this study we will stop producing it, since it isn't used for heating homes, as an industrial fuel or used in power plants?
I would guess that vehicle fueling is the smallest category of use of natural gas and even if we abandoned it totally as a vehicle fuel it would not change the amount of natural gas produced. So going back to diesel in all the vehicles that now use it would be a net gain in greenhouse gas production, since there would be almost no change in methane leaks from gas production.
I sometimes think this is due to the paramilitary, authoritarian nature of law enforcement, with all of its military-style ranks, commands, etc.
There seems to be something about those kinds of organizations that is always inclined to hide and cover up mistakes than to admit a simple mistake and make amends for it. The organizations seem highly punitive internally, with a low tolerance for errors. They also seem to look at making mistakes or at least admitting to them as somehow undermining their authority, as if their authority only works if they are always right.
I'd also imagine in a case like the no-fly list there are a lot of top-down orders that the list is always right, and if there are questions, see rule #1.
That's a pretty good observation.
On one hand, you have a set of "rational" social values regarding going to college, being a moral, law abiding person, working hard, etc. all leading to good outcomes and yet none of it seems true anymore -- the plutocracy steals with impunity, working hard doesn't produce any rewards, college leads to lifelong indebtedness, etc.
On the other, you have an economy that never seems to get better for anyone but the rich, an environment that at best produces strange weather and otherwise is nothing but bad news, never ending military conflicts, etc.
It does sound like a common pretext to abandon science and reason and escape into religion.
Yay, another rich asshole on my tail with even brighter headlights. Awesome.
I don't know how they can get months of standby time on a charge without "sleeping" the 802.11 connection and reconnecting. Maintaining a continuous wifi connection would kill the batteries in hours, not months like they claim.
Airlines don't make any money on your mobile phone calls, that's the difference and that's why we really had this "debate" to begin with.
Once the FAA finally caved in to reason and the fact that planes weren't regularly falling out of the sky due to cell phones being left on, it left the door open ever so slightly to the idea that a captive customer base might somehow start getting free stuff that the airline could otherwise make money on.
Fortunately for them they were able to prod enough columnists and astroturfers into creating a "zOMG cellphones!" controversy that everyone was "opposed" to, guaranteeing crusading congressional "leaders" a chance to enshrine a voice call monopoly into law.
The doorbot looks pretty cool. I hate getting up to see if the person ringing the door is someone I want to answer the door for (like my son's friends when he's not home, morons ignoring my no soliciting sign, etc).
One thing I couldn't tell was whether it was possible to query the doorbot's camera arbitrarily without having someone necessarily ring the doorbell. I suppose not for power management reasons, although the power management angle makes me wonder how long it takes between someone pressing the door bot button and getting a notification. I'm guessing the device has to warm boot, including making an 802.11 connection, which seems like it could add a delay.
I've only been to Las Vegas 5 times in the past 8 years and have always waited over a half hour, usually closer to an hour. I've usually landed between 7 PM and Midnight and the line for the cabs is ridiculous. There's no shortage of cabs, but they can only load so many people so fast.