What happens when Google, EBay and Amazon decide to start offering a pseudo currency of their own? Forget the bitcoin mining aspects of it, the three of them decide to offer people "GAE" coin that's good for buying anything sold by either of those three companies.
The currency is backed by the size and scale of these companies and provides a deep utility considering there's not much you can't buy from any of these three vendors. If you sold something or were looking for a credit from Amazon and they offered you cash or their currency at a 25% premium it might be tempting for a lot of people to take the credit.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if at some point some consortium of companies did decide to collaborate on a cross-company store credit of some kind, especially as national currencies become bloated by fiat monetary policies.
From what I've seen, the Tesla uses a LOT of electric power to charge. If you drive it during the day you won't be charging it at your home solar installation.
If I need to recoup 60 miles of range per night, I need 20kWh of power at night. Assuming perfect storage efficiency, I need something like 135 square meters of solar just to keep a minimal driving distance on my car. None of this says anything about my actual power consumption in my home, which might double my total solar area or larger once you factor in inefficiencies. At this point, I've already tripled the square footage of my actual roof space and am starting to approach something like half of my entire lot size.
I also live in Minnesota, so I could probably increase all this by a third to account for the lack of sunlight in the winter.
I think it will take a factor of 10 improvement in batteries and solar panel efficiencies to make any of this possible.
There seemed to be a whole Satanism industry by the mid-late '70s.
There were a ton of movies like "Race with the Devil", the whole backwards masking "expose" in rock music not to mention the literal threat posed by Black Sabbath and the existential (or is it metaphysical?) threat associated with cults, ironically many of which were Christian-based.
I'm not sure if dope smoking Baby Boomers were ever really the source of the Satanism backlash, I think much of it was the generation before the Boomers who had come of age before a lot of the cultural upheaval of the late '60s and were still reacting to the upheaval of the 1960s and a lot of the dramatic political shifts of the early 1970s. Cue the rise of the Moral Majority, evangelicals and the election of Ronald Reagan.
I'd like to see a Google Maps mashup with the data overlayed over it for better panning and zooming.
The NYC GIS map is awkward to use and the rat data doesn't appear to show above a very close in zoom level.
There may be some other link to a city-wide heat map but I didn't find it on the rat portal web site and slashdot's total brain damaged linking to most stories doesn't help.
I was surprised no one from OKC was interviewed to get their interpretation of what he did.
Based on what I read, he didn't game the system in a dishonest way. All he did was try to figure out what groups of women he was interested in and what survey questions those groups answered, and then tailor a profile for each group so that he answered the same questions they did to increase the match potential. It said more than once in the article that he answered the survey questions themselves honestly, it was just a matter of knowing what question to answer.
It's only gaming the system if he was dishonest with his answers or if there's some value placed on what questions you answer versus what questions you don't answer -- like some psych survey that gives you 50 questions and tells you to pick 10 to answer and your "score" is based on both your answers to the questions AND what categories or other qualities are assigned to the questions themselves.
Anyway, I would think that if OKC was honest about this they would think of his work positively -- if the goal is to actually put people together for dates, his system actually improves on what they do now.
Although part of me wants to think that OKC or any other dating site actually has a reverse incentive; if the site results in easy, long-term matchmaking it results in reduced user pools and lower ad revenue (or subscriptions for paid sites). Their actual incentive is to keep users on the site for as long as possible, with just enough success to hold their interest but not enough success for them to leave the site.
What I find somewhat ironic, though, was how actually unsuccessful his actual dating was, and the article seemed to gloss over these details. Partly his categorization seemed problematic (East LA artist types) resulting in geographic problems, and maybe part of it was he just had bad dating skills (drinking, etc).
The article mentioned more than once that he answered his profile questions honestly; he just used statistics to figure out the target pools he was interested in and which survey questions they answered.
He said he honestly answered his survey questions, it was just a question of which survey questions to answer for the basic grouping of women he was interested in.
I've met in the last year two examples of women who are very attractive yet married to husbands much less attractive than them. Neither husband is wealthy, influential or athletic and in one case the wife earns 3x what her husband does and is in better physical condition than 90% of college age women. There's little explanation for the disparity in appearances other than some women really don't care.
Personally, I think women who say "Looks don't matter" aren't really telling the whole story -- looks DO matter, they have some kind of appearance standard, but they aren't specifically looking for the absolutely best looking man they can find. But in some cases there really are women who apparently don't care very much about appearance or at least have a very wide range of appearances they find appealing.
I also think that in some cases "Looks don't matter" women may also not be attractive enough to "keep" a very attractive man; they may have had negative experiences (cheating, other kinds of mistreatment) and are trying to state a conscious desire to retarget their focus on men who are attractive but just not so attractive that they are hard to maintain a relationship with.
But I also think that men use a woman's looks as a metric for sexual appeal. I know I have known women who were interested in me that I was very socially compatible with but I didn't find attractive; there was no way for me to bridge that gap because no matter how good their personalities I had no sexual interest.
In both of the couples I mentioned above the husbands are socially gregarious and likable, and I wonder if appearance is used by women as a metric of social appeal, so a man of perhaps lower appearance who has a much higher actual social appeal may make up for his appearance with his personality. It seems to generally fit the idea that female sexuality is less commonly motivated by visual appeal and more by other qualities.
It'll be an endless race, harder than jailbreaking an iPhone because any time it goes to the dealer for any reason they will just reset all the features back to what you paid for and update the system so that the last hack you used doesn't work anymore because they've also updated the software.
In a country with an ideology and political system with a history of "re-education" camps designed to purge thinking inconsistent with the party's official doctrine, I wonder how much of this is just something designed to appease party ideologues, the party equivalent of evangelical Christians, especially in an era of state sanctioned capitalism.
Although I can see how MMORPGs promote a kind of relentless, it-never-stops gameplay, especially for games where not playing can cause you to lose in-game status, either with in-game groups or with whatever in-game stuff you've built.
My nine-year-old likes to play "Clash of Clans" on my wife's iPad. We greatly restrict his amount of game play and he has gotten upset when circumstances have limited his game play over several days and he's lost some in-game status. He's kind of gotten used to it, though, although this leads me to make sure he doesn't get too involved in any of these games.
I'd be more inclined to agree with you if there was a product with the same features as cellular data that competed with it, but there isn't. Fixed wireless and terrestrial communications aren't comparable.
And it's not like the "free market" has done much for cellular service besides create private near-monopolies with built-in anti-competitive features like device locking and incompatible protocols, implementations and frequencies, coupled with high prices and weak infrastructure investments. Not to mention the grossly inefficient duplication of resources -- the aggregate unused capacity of all carriers costs money to provide and we pay for it.
The electricity, water and natural gas systems have done a pretty good job as regulated monopolies, still manage to make money and deliver product without too many problems.
Since the demand for cellular connectivity is high and the market unlikely to switch to any other service in the foreseeable future, it's hard to see how this wouldn't work. Wholesale pricing to retail carriers could easily be calculated as a function of fixed profit margins, R&D investment, capital expansion and operating costs.
What might work as well would just be a cellular licensing requirement that mandates that all carriers use interoperable frequencies and protocols so that handsets can communicate with any carrier. Carriers could track which "customer" used what services with their tower and implement a chargeback system so that carriers with less infrastructure wouldn't be subsidized by carriers with more infrastructure.
The current system now is false competition and we pay for all its inefficiencies because the switching costs are high.
You only need that if you're going to run the vmxnet3 interface.
The e1000 virtual NIC is supported without any problems with the em driver in FreeBSD. ESXi generally reports a link speed at the maximum throughput the driver supports (ifconfig shows 1000Mbit for me on two FreeBSD guests), but this is just a reported link speed.
IIRC, the *actual* throughput capable isn't limited to this reported link speed, although there may be limits imposed by the way the driver in the guest implements timing and interrupt handling. Windows guests would often exceed this with the "flexible"/Vlance interface.
The vmxnet3 interface is superior for very heavy network loads and supports functionality not found in the e1000 interface. I use this with Windows guests exclusively but usually stick to the e1000 in FreeBSD if I plan to avoid dealing with the tools install.
As far as I know, VMware tools doesn't provide any filesystem paravirtualization. It will improve mouse and video performance and implement some memory management tools to help the hypervisor know what used memory is active vs. inactive, memory ballooning and time sync.
I think disk virtualization is a pretty simple mapping of SCSI block access to the virtual disk file. I've run a number of FreeBSD systems on ESX without any issues of growing disk files.
The only issues I've ever had on VMware have been with time stability, and IIRC there's a HZ= kernel option that fixes this. Brute force NTP syncing worked too, although inelegant.
I've long that this should happen in the cellular market.
To me it makes zero economic sense to have four major carriers each building and using a separate wireless infrastructure and using 4x the wireless spectrum.
Rather than have the government operate it, I'd prefer to see a heavily regulated monopoly run the towers and backhaul and sell wholesale to retail providers who looked like the existing carriers now, minus the wireless infrastructure. Regulatory oversight would be used to minimize costs, set targets for infrastructure upgrade and investment, executive compensation and maximum profit margin.
The benefit should be a lower cost for cellular data since you're removing at least a third of the excess infrastructure by having a common wireless network not arbitrarily split between carriers. I'm not sure if it would make phones cheaper, but the phones themselves would need less radio complexity although the handset makers may already be integrating universal radio functionality now.
Carriers selling the actual cell service to users would be forced to be a lot more customer service oriented since switching providers would be trivial. Setting up a new "carrier" would be much easier, since you wouldn't have to build an entire network. This might mean more innovative cellular data products, too, as some retail carriers may decide to specialize in low speed data devices or other niches where they can keep their costs lower than providing retail voice-type service.
On my last flight I was able to track my position on the iPhone Maps application.
I don't know, but it looks like the US states map is built in because I was expecting a blank screen or the checkerboard.but I had the vanilla states map without any problem.
Accuracy (based on the little circle on the map) wasn't good, maybe a couple hundred miles, but at least I had some idea where we were.
I keep asking myself why the NSA isn't more involved in large-scale financial fraud considering their ample abilities to sample international data networks and their likely considerable focus on Russia and the involvement of shady financial transactions in funding terrorism.
In the case of Russia specifically, I would expect the NSA to be heavily involved in monitoring Russian hackers given the shadowy nexus of hackers, organized crime, ex-KGB agents, and the current FSB.
I think the lifestyle has become part of the promotional effort.
In the People/TMZ/etc celebrity-hype environment we live in, the lifestyle almost seems to drive the artist, not the artist driving the lifestyle. Bieber seems famous for being Bieber and doing stupid celebrity stunts almost as much for making pop music.
And in many ways, once the lifestyle reaches some critical mass, it almost seems self-sustaining without the need for any external support (such as producing music). Look at someone like Lindsay Lohan -- her entire life seems to be spent living in expensive hotels (when she's not in jail), shopping and wearing designer clothes, yet she hasn't been involved with big-money film since Mean Girls 10 years ago.
It's baffling how she manages to keep this going with no more than a handful of TV appearances. Her legal bills alone are probably more than I've paid on my mortgage in the last 15 years.
I think in the 1970s the labels did fund a lot of the lifestyle of artists once they got popular, they got massive advances against multi-album contracts because the famous-for-being-famous celebrity engine wasn't what it is now.
The idea that popped into my head was a virtual volume whose backing store was a directory full of image files with the data spread out across the image files using a distributed parity system. Ideally it would be encrypted prior to being stored steganographically in the image files.
With the right automation you could have the storage system dynamically use something like Google image search to grab new images to use as stego storage targets.
I think Apple has done a pretty good job of avoiding most of the pitfalls of Betamax, though.
There's a lot of software for iOS devices, whereas Betamax had a prerecorded content deficit that definitely helped VHS gain market share.
It's also not easy map the "recording time" advantage to any specific deficiency in iOS hardware. About the closest you could come would be saying that some Android phones have bigger displays, but that's not a deficiency of all iOS devices if you include iPads and its not clear that most people feel handicapped because their iPhones don't have a screen as big as a Galaxy S.
Billionaires pushing policies that benefit billionaires lacks irony.
"Limousine liberal" generally applies to a wealthy person pushing a putatively altruistic solution which imposes costs on those less able to bear them.
It's often associated with increased taxation. A limousine liberal may advocate for an increase in property taxes to help fund schools, a cost that they can easily bear but which is regressive on the rest of the population (while all the while sending their kids to private schools).
Other examples include "gas guzzler taxes" or increased gasoline taxes; trivial increased costs to them, but more imposing to people aren't rich.
Most of the other self-made people I know with high incomes live much more affluently -- lake homes, country club memberships, Mercedes in the driveway. They're not living faux glam lifestyles, but they're not nearly as non-materialistic as Jeff is. None of them grew up in affluent households, all were squarely middle class with the exception of one, who was the daughter of an Italian immigrant who worked as a maintenance person on the NYC subway.
Jeff didn't really grow up poor or at the low end of the spectrum. Both his parents were PhDs with good jobs and the house he lived in was in a neighborhood considered affluent, although I wouldn't call his family's lifestyle affluent; I think he was just raised by parents who had better than average means but did not really live a lifestyle focused on material consumption.
In Jeff's case, I think he's just one of those technology people with an intense focus. It helps he's extremely intelligent and capable.
I was friends with Jeff Dean in high school and he was my roommate in college for a year. We don't keep in touch much but he was in Minneapolis last fall and we got together for breakfast.
If Jeff Dean is making $3M a year, you wouldn't know it. He's one of the least materialistic people I've ever known and I'd guess that between salary and stock options he could if he wanted to live a pretty high-end lifestyle. But he doesn't.
When we were planning our breakfast, he was staying St. Paul because a charity his wife is involved with was having a board meeting. He wanted to pick a place he could WALK to, which is kind of challenge if you're in downtown St. Paul. I was thinking "Walk? You don't have a town car? A rental? Or a self-driving car?"
Anyone else making a $3M a year wouldn't be walking or would want to have some kind of fancy brunch at the St. Paul Hotel (which I don't think he was staying in, either).
I even asked him as gently as I could -- "How much do you still work? I mean, you don't need to, do you?" His answer was "only about 50 hours a week." "Why?" "There's still a lot of interesting problems."
I don't think Jeff works for the money or even cares that much.
I also asked him about the NSA revelations and he said that they were "really pissed" and "making internal changes to make it a lot harder to get any useful information."
Slashdot Mirror
What happens when Google, EBay and Amazon decide to start offering a pseudo currency of their own? Forget the bitcoin mining aspects of it, the three of them decide to offer people "GAE" coin that's good for buying anything sold by either of those three companies.
The currency is backed by the size and scale of these companies and provides a deep utility considering there's not much you can't buy from any of these three vendors. If you sold something or were looking for a credit from Amazon and they offered you cash or their currency at a 25% premium it might be tempting for a lot of people to take the credit.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if at some point some consortium of companies did decide to collaborate on a cross-company store credit of some kind, especially as national currencies become bloated by fiat monetary policies.
From what I've seen, the Tesla uses a LOT of electric power to charge. If you drive it during the day you won't be charging it at your home solar installation.
If I need to recoup 60 miles of range per night, I need 20kWh of power at night. Assuming perfect storage efficiency, I need something like 135 square meters of solar just to keep a minimal driving distance on my car. None of this says anything about my actual power consumption in my home, which might double my total solar area or larger once you factor in inefficiencies. At this point, I've already tripled the square footage of my actual roof space and am starting to approach something like half of my entire lot size.
I also live in Minnesota, so I could probably increase all this by a third to account for the lack of sunlight in the winter.
I think it will take a factor of 10 improvement in batteries and solar panel efficiencies to make any of this possible.
There seemed to be a whole Satanism industry by the mid-late '70s.
There were a ton of movies like "Race with the Devil", the whole backwards masking "expose" in rock music not to mention the literal threat posed by Black Sabbath and the existential (or is it metaphysical?) threat associated with cults, ironically many of which were Christian-based.
I'm not sure if dope smoking Baby Boomers were ever really the source of the Satanism backlash, I think much of it was the generation before the Boomers who had come of age before a lot of the cultural upheaval of the late '60s and were still reacting to the upheaval of the 1960s and a lot of the dramatic political shifts of the early 1970s. Cue the rise of the Moral Majority, evangelicals and the election of Ronald Reagan.
I'd like to see a Google Maps mashup with the data overlayed over it for better panning and zooming.
The NYC GIS map is awkward to use and the rat data doesn't appear to show above a very close in zoom level.
There may be some other link to a city-wide heat map but I didn't find it on the rat portal web site and slashdot's total brain damaged linking to most stories doesn't help.
I was surprised no one from OKC was interviewed to get their interpretation of what he did.
Based on what I read, he didn't game the system in a dishonest way. All he did was try to figure out what groups of women he was interested in and what survey questions those groups answered, and then tailor a profile for each group so that he answered the same questions they did to increase the match potential. It said more than once in the article that he answered the survey questions themselves honestly, it was just a matter of knowing what question to answer.
It's only gaming the system if he was dishonest with his answers or if there's some value placed on what questions you answer versus what questions you don't answer -- like some psych survey that gives you 50 questions and tells you to pick 10 to answer and your "score" is based on both your answers to the questions AND what categories or other qualities are assigned to the questions themselves.
Anyway, I would think that if OKC was honest about this they would think of his work positively -- if the goal is to actually put people together for dates, his system actually improves on what they do now.
Although part of me wants to think that OKC or any other dating site actually has a reverse incentive; if the site results in easy, long-term matchmaking it results in reduced user pools and lower ad revenue (or subscriptions for paid sites). Their actual incentive is to keep users on the site for as long as possible, with just enough success to hold their interest but not enough success for them to leave the site.
What I find somewhat ironic, though, was how actually unsuccessful his actual dating was, and the article seemed to gloss over these details. Partly his categorization seemed problematic (East LA artist types) resulting in geographic problems, and maybe part of it was he just had bad dating skills (drinking, etc).
The article mentioned more than once that he answered his profile questions honestly; he just used statistics to figure out the target pools he was interested in and which survey questions they answered.
He said he honestly answered his survey questions, it was just a question of which survey questions to answer for the basic grouping of women he was interested in.
I've met in the last year two examples of women who are very attractive yet married to husbands much less attractive than them. Neither husband is wealthy, influential or athletic and in one case the wife earns 3x what her husband does and is in better physical condition than 90% of college age women. There's little explanation for the disparity in appearances other than some women really don't care.
Personally, I think women who say "Looks don't matter" aren't really telling the whole story -- looks DO matter, they have some kind of appearance standard, but they aren't specifically looking for the absolutely best looking man they can find. But in some cases there really are women who apparently don't care very much about appearance or at least have a very wide range of appearances they find appealing.
I also think that in some cases "Looks don't matter" women may also not be attractive enough to "keep" a very attractive man; they may have had negative experiences (cheating, other kinds of mistreatment) and are trying to state a conscious desire to retarget their focus on men who are attractive but just not so attractive that they are hard to maintain a relationship with.
But I also think that men use a woman's looks as a metric for sexual appeal. I know I have known women who were interested in me that I was very socially compatible with but I didn't find attractive; there was no way for me to bridge that gap because no matter how good their personalities I had no sexual interest.
In both of the couples I mentioned above the husbands are socially gregarious and likable, and I wonder if appearance is used by women as a metric of social appeal, so a man of perhaps lower appearance who has a much higher actual social appeal may make up for his appearance with his personality. It seems to generally fit the idea that female sexuality is less commonly motivated by visual appeal and more by other qualities.
It'll be an endless race, harder than jailbreaking an iPhone because any time it goes to the dealer for any reason they will just reset all the features back to what you paid for and update the system so that the last hack you used doesn't work anymore because they've also updated the software.
There is. They're called opioids. But taking opioids makes you a dangerous drug addict, so you're not allowed to have them.
In a country with an ideology and political system with a history of "re-education" camps designed to purge thinking inconsistent with the party's official doctrine, I wonder how much of this is just something designed to appease party ideologues, the party equivalent of evangelical Christians, especially in an era of state sanctioned capitalism.
Although I can see how MMORPGs promote a kind of relentless, it-never-stops gameplay, especially for games where not playing can cause you to lose in-game status, either with in-game groups or with whatever in-game stuff you've built.
My nine-year-old likes to play "Clash of Clans" on my wife's iPad. We greatly restrict his amount of game play and he has gotten upset when circumstances have limited his game play over several days and he's lost some in-game status. He's kind of gotten used to it, though, although this leads me to make sure he doesn't get too involved in any of these games.
I'd be more inclined to agree with you if there was a product with the same features as cellular data that competed with it, but there isn't. Fixed wireless and terrestrial communications aren't comparable.
And it's not like the "free market" has done much for cellular service besides create private near-monopolies with built-in anti-competitive features like device locking and incompatible protocols, implementations and frequencies, coupled with high prices and weak infrastructure investments. Not to mention the grossly inefficient duplication of resources -- the aggregate unused capacity of all carriers costs money to provide and we pay for it.
The electricity, water and natural gas systems have done a pretty good job as regulated monopolies, still manage to make money and deliver product without too many problems.
Since the demand for cellular connectivity is high and the market unlikely to switch to any other service in the foreseeable future, it's hard to see how this wouldn't work. Wholesale pricing to retail carriers could easily be calculated as a function of fixed profit margins, R&D investment, capital expansion and operating costs.
What might work as well would just be a cellular licensing requirement that mandates that all carriers use interoperable frequencies and protocols so that handsets can communicate with any carrier. Carriers could track which "customer" used what services with their tower and implement a chargeback system so that carriers with less infrastructure wouldn't be subsidized by carriers with more infrastructure.
The current system now is false competition and we pay for all its inefficiencies because the switching costs are high.
You only need that if you're going to run the vmxnet3 interface.
The e1000 virtual NIC is supported without any problems with the em driver in FreeBSD. ESXi generally reports a link speed at the maximum throughput the driver supports (ifconfig shows 1000Mbit for me on two FreeBSD guests), but this is just a reported link speed.
IIRC, the *actual* throughput capable isn't limited to this reported link speed, although there may be limits imposed by the way the driver in the guest implements timing and interrupt handling. Windows guests would often exceed this with the "flexible"/Vlance interface.
The vmxnet3 interface is superior for very heavy network loads and supports functionality not found in the e1000 interface. I use this with Windows guests exclusively but usually stick to the e1000 in FreeBSD if I plan to avoid dealing with the tools install.
Tourism and robots didn't work out so well.
As far as I know, VMware tools doesn't provide any filesystem paravirtualization. It will improve mouse and video performance and implement some memory management tools to help the hypervisor know what used memory is active vs. inactive, memory ballooning and time sync.
I think disk virtualization is a pretty simple mapping of SCSI block access to the virtual disk file. I've run a number of FreeBSD systems on ESX without any issues of growing disk files.
The only issues I've ever had on VMware have been with time stability, and IIRC there's a HZ= kernel option that fixes this. Brute force NTP syncing worked too, although inelegant.
I've long that this should happen in the cellular market.
To me it makes zero economic sense to have four major carriers each building and using a separate wireless infrastructure and using 4x the wireless spectrum.
Rather than have the government operate it, I'd prefer to see a heavily regulated monopoly run the towers and backhaul and sell wholesale to retail providers who looked like the existing carriers now, minus the wireless infrastructure. Regulatory oversight would be used to minimize costs, set targets for infrastructure upgrade and investment, executive compensation and maximum profit margin.
The benefit should be a lower cost for cellular data since you're removing at least a third of the excess infrastructure by having a common wireless network not arbitrarily split between carriers. I'm not sure if it would make phones cheaper, but the phones themselves would need less radio complexity although the handset makers may already be integrating universal radio functionality now.
Carriers selling the actual cell service to users would be forced to be a lot more customer service oriented since switching providers would be trivial. Setting up a new "carrier" would be much easier, since you wouldn't have to build an entire network. This might mean more innovative cellular data products, too, as some retail carriers may decide to specialize in low speed data devices or other niches where they can keep their costs lower than providing retail voice-type service.
On my last flight I was able to track my position on the iPhone Maps application.
I don't know, but it looks like the US states map is built in because I was expecting a blank screen or the checkerboard.but I had the vanilla states map without any problem.
Accuracy (based on the little circle on the map) wasn't good, maybe a couple hundred miles, but at least I had some idea where we were.
Should there be more proactive blackholing of Russia?
Is even practical given the many proxies, hacked non-Russian servers, etc?
I keep asking myself why the NSA isn't more involved in large-scale financial fraud considering their ample abilities to sample international data networks and their likely considerable focus on Russia and the involvement of shady financial transactions in funding terrorism.
In the case of Russia specifically, I would expect the NSA to be heavily involved in monitoring Russian hackers given the shadowy nexus of hackers, organized crime, ex-KGB agents, and the current FSB.
I think the lifestyle has become part of the promotional effort.
In the People/TMZ/etc celebrity-hype environment we live in, the lifestyle almost seems to drive the artist, not the artist driving the lifestyle. Bieber seems famous for being Bieber and doing stupid celebrity stunts almost as much for making pop music.
And in many ways, once the lifestyle reaches some critical mass, it almost seems self-sustaining without the need for any external support (such as producing music). Look at someone like Lindsay Lohan -- her entire life seems to be spent living in expensive hotels (when she's not in jail), shopping and wearing designer clothes, yet she hasn't been involved with big-money film since Mean Girls 10 years ago.
It's baffling how she manages to keep this going with no more than a handful of TV appearances. Her legal bills alone are probably more than I've paid on my mortgage in the last 15 years.
I think in the 1970s the labels did fund a lot of the lifestyle of artists once they got popular, they got massive advances against multi-album contracts because the famous-for-being-famous celebrity engine wasn't what it is now.
I was thinking of something similar.
The idea that popped into my head was a virtual volume whose backing store was a directory full of image files with the data spread out across the image files using a distributed parity system. Ideally it would be encrypted prior to being stored steganographically in the image files.
With the right automation you could have the storage system dynamically use something like Google image search to grab new images to use as stego storage targets.
I think Apple has done a pretty good job of avoiding most of the pitfalls of Betamax, though.
There's a lot of software for iOS devices, whereas Betamax had a prerecorded content deficit that definitely helped VHS gain market share.
It's also not easy map the "recording time" advantage to any specific deficiency in iOS hardware. About the closest you could come would be saying that some Android phones have bigger displays, but that's not a deficiency of all iOS devices if you include iPads and its not clear that most people feel handicapped because their iPhones don't have a screen as big as a Galaxy S.
...is that yacht builder Sea Ray and several Mercedes Benz dealers will see a significant boost in revenue.
Billionaires pushing policies that benefit billionaires lacks irony.
"Limousine liberal" generally applies to a wealthy person pushing a putatively altruistic solution which imposes costs on those less able to bear them.
It's often associated with increased taxation. A limousine liberal may advocate for an increase in property taxes to help fund schools, a cost that they can easily bear but which is regressive on the rest of the population (while all the while sending their kids to private schools).
Other examples include "gas guzzler taxes" or increased gasoline taxes; trivial increased costs to them, but more imposing to people aren't rich.
Most of the other self-made people I know with high incomes live much more affluently -- lake homes, country club memberships, Mercedes in the driveway. They're not living faux glam lifestyles, but they're not nearly as non-materialistic as Jeff is. None of them grew up in affluent households, all were squarely middle class with the exception of one, who was the daughter of an Italian immigrant who worked as a maintenance person on the NYC subway.
Jeff didn't really grow up poor or at the low end of the spectrum. Both his parents were PhDs with good jobs and the house he lived in was in a neighborhood considered affluent, although I wouldn't call his family's lifestyle affluent; I think he was just raised by parents who had better than average means but did not really live a lifestyle focused on material consumption.
In Jeff's case, I think he's just one of those technology people with an intense focus. It helps he's extremely intelligent and capable.
I was friends with Jeff Dean in high school and he was my roommate in college for a year. We don't keep in touch much but he was in Minneapolis last fall and we got together for breakfast.
If Jeff Dean is making $3M a year, you wouldn't know it. He's one of the least materialistic people I've ever known and I'd guess that between salary and stock options he could if he wanted to live a pretty high-end lifestyle. But he doesn't.
When we were planning our breakfast, he was staying St. Paul because a charity his wife is involved with was having a board meeting. He wanted to pick a place he could WALK to, which is kind of challenge if you're in downtown St. Paul. I was thinking "Walk? You don't have a town car? A rental? Or a self-driving car?"
Anyone else making a $3M a year wouldn't be walking or would want to have some kind of fancy brunch at the St. Paul Hotel (which I don't think he was staying in, either).
I even asked him as gently as I could -- "How much do you still work? I mean, you don't need to, do you?" His answer was "only about 50 hours a week." "Why?" "There's still a lot of interesting problems."
I don't think Jeff works for the money or even cares that much.
I also asked him about the NSA revelations and he said that they were "really pissed" and "making internal changes to make it a lot harder to get any useful information."