There was another story in this paper as well about this I couldn't find the link to -- a survey found that the "problem" wasn't a lack of workers, it was the low wages and working conditions that kept employers from recruiting workers.
Training is an issue as well -- employers have a desire to hire "ready for work" employers, even though the employees they often want need to have extensive education and experience with complex, high tech manufacturing systems that are difficult to get experience with...without working on one.
It's a self-perpetuating problem for employers. As long as they refuse to invest in training and paying salaries, they will have a shortage of workers.
I also think they have another problem -- the culture of manufacturing and blue collar employment generally. Manufacturing jobs have historically been "dumb" jobs -- the kind of work some high school dropout or grad got working on an assembly line turning a bolt, adding a part or whatever. Little to no skill, no education. Treat them awful and throw them away, we can always plug another body into this. It's why much of this COULD be outsourced -- there's little difference between an ex-jock who barely got a high school diploma and some third world country mouse who moved to the city.
Unions boosted the wages of these jobs until the early 70s, but there was always this cultural gulf between "labor" and "management"" and usually open hostility, as management sought to screw labor any way they could, and labor sought to take management for maximum compensation and minimum work. Labor were people to be piss-tested, searched and yelled at, and sic your security goons on if they step out of line.
Now we're at this point where the people manufacturers need aren't the dumb HS grads or third world peons, they are educated people with extensive skills, but business keep perpetuating this fucked up class warfare kind of culture, with the working conditions and pay to go with it. No wonder they can't find people -- anyone self-aware enough and smart enough to do this kind of work wants nothing to do with being treated as little more than a slave.
If we would have a manufacturing environment that treated the skilled workers more like white collar office workers and paid them that way, I can only imagine the talent pool would grow a lot deeper and the productivity would skyrocket.
It strikes me that the primary value to cloud operators of non-interoperable clouds is vendor lock-in -- once you're on their cloud, migrating to another is more work, downtime, etc. It forces you stay put unless you REALLY want to change.
However, a truly interoperable cloud environment sounds like a race to the bottom for vendors -- who can be the cheapest?
It's not hard to see people running management software that figures out what the cheapest vendor is on some regular basis and doing migrations to other vendors as soon as there's enough price break to make it worth what downtime there might be or to build a presence in many compatible clouds, keep your data synced and just move your workloads to whoever's cheapest.
It's not hard to see this kind of thing happening in near real-time for people with the management tools and architecture.
You're generally right, but the American version of Life on Mars wasn't bad on it's own merits, even if it was somehow not as good as the British version.
At least the cast was decent -- it seemed unusual to have Keitel, Mol, Imperioli all on a network TV series.
For network devices, what about some compromise that combined some part of the serial number and last 3 bytes of the MAC address? Most devices have the serial number machine readable and presumably the MAC address is as well.
This would make guessing far more complicated, especially if there was some effort made in production to "randomize" serial number and MAC address relationships so they didn't march in linear lockstep.
These values should be easily found on the equipment if there was any question as to what they were, and the ROM could be configured in such a way that any "factory reset" would use this combination automatically.
This wouldn't be perfect security -- brute forcing attacks would probably be less hard as the MAC and S/N space would be known, but with a non-linear association between serial numbers and MACs it might still be time-consuming -- a 12 character password of even known value ranges but semi-random relationships would still be time-consuming.
To some extent, taxes are zero sum. The government has an operating expense it has to meet and imposes taxation to meet its expenses. Those who shelter their income from taxation boost the tax paid by those unable to shelter their income as the government raises marginal rates to meet their revenue needs.
Google takes a holistic approach to employee compensation, which includes workplace benefits such as free meals, since it makes the job more attractive than cash alone might.
This amounts to an employee benefit of more than a de minimis value (like, say, free coffee or sodas), which makes it more like income for the employee, which should make it a taxable compensatory benefit.
So when a Google employee gets income in the form of meals without paying income taxes on it, they are in effect sheltering their income from taxes and shifting the tax burden to taxpayers not receiving tax free meals.
I get that there's probably a lot of wireless expansion happening in the less developed world, but is wireless -- in terms of cell sites -- expanding that rapidly in the developed world, where there's already a fair amount of cell coverage density?
And is LTE more energy intensive for cell towers? I would have assumed that over time the energy consumption of a cell site would stay about flat over time as transmission technologies got more efficient (ie, superior signaling, better low-power modes for fewer handset status updates) and the equipment itself increased its processing power relative to its actual power consumption (faster CPUs, better integration at the IC level, etc).
Somehow I don't see a major expansion in terms of number of cell sites in the US. I'm sure there is growth, but I'd also expect that most of the capital is going to technology upgrades for LTE, improved backhaul, etc.
They talk to legitimate business people trying to run a dispensary and handling money is a huge problem for them. It's almost nearly impossible to get a commercial bank account and really complicated to try to run it on a cash basis. The banks are paranoid because its illegal at a Federal level and there's all kinds of ways for the Feds make pain -- money laundering laws, revoking Federal bank charters, seizing assets, and so forth. Suppliers, landlords, employees, the government, customers -- everybody wants to get paid and cash is really clumsy and sometimes not an option.
And of course, they want to be consumer friendly and take plastic, but good luck without banking. I may be remembering this wrong, but they use the gimmick of the low-rent cash machine which will also do purchases-as-cash-advance-for-a-fee so credit card users can "buy" without a cash advance from the credit card company's perspective.
At the end of the day, a pot dispensary should be no different than any other specialty retailer -- doing payroll mostly electronically with printed checks for those who want them, a line of credit at the bank, and various accounts to park cash in or fund check writing, and taking all the usual plastic money from customers.
I can't help but think that the pot business now is something like the Internet was circa about 1991. There was a sense it was going to be a big deal and there was going to be a lot of money made, but nobody quite knew how to do it right away.
And like the Internet, I'll be looking back 20 years from now amazed at how much money has been made off it and how it's universally accepted, just like the Internet.
I don't want to run fucking antispamware on my phone.
Telephone exchange operators should be running this software and doing some basic sanity checks on calls entering their networks from the outside of them.
Individuals or businesses abusing trunk lines should be barred from future service. CLECs and other carrier-like entities who permit abuse should lose network access as well.
What boggles my mind about all this is the carriers standing around with their dicks in their hands with a "gee, there's nothing we can do..." attitude.
The FCC should impose fines on the carriers, too, and then we'll see how quickly they can fix this problem.
...follow the money trail and file a RICO suit against EVERYONE involved in the money trail, especially managers and executives or anyone else who would have "created a climate accepting of working with illegal businesses".
Perp walk those fuckers on national news, naming names and home towns.
If we ratchet up the fear factor high enough, nobody will work with these assholes anymore, and if you can't collect money what's the point? Sure, some politically minded assholes will still robocall ("Stop Obama!", "Legalize Gay Marriage", etc), but if it doesn't make any money, nobody will do it.
There's a big chunk of the "legitimate" economy at work here to keep these guys going -- if we take away their 2% take and make sure some of them do 20 in Lewisberg while desperately holding the soap then this will dampen the urge to dabble at the fringes of the economy.
Every time the concept of legalizing drugs is raised someone raises the issue of "widespread use" and usually of drugs with a high addiction potential.
Yet these people never explain why millions of people with no inclination to drink more than a couple of glasses of wine or beer a week -- despite the fact that it's legal, cheap and broadly accepted to drink more than that -- would suddenly start having interest in heroin, amphetamines or cocaine.
The only way I can explain this happening is "legalizing" being made semantically equivalent to "mass commercialization and marketing" and the general public suddenly being largely tricked in consuming products with these drugs blended in ("Mountain Dew Super Rush!") or in new formulations ("Tylenol UltraPain, now with 10 mg oxycodone!") or as "new" products with their real content hidden.
First of all, no legalization regime for anything stronger than marijuana would ever allow for these substances -- all accepted as drugs -- to be added to existing consumer products, and the FDA would likely NOT approve them being added to OTC drug formulations, either., even under existing law. Secondly, I don't think even the biggest legalize-everything advocates would back the kind of crass commercialism we have now, even at the limited levels permitted for alcohol sales.
Most importantly, the social stigma of these drugs wouldn't go away overnight if ever, really. I can drink a beer at a suburban kids birthday party, it seems highly unlikely though that in anything less than a generation I'd be able to snort a couple of lines of coke or heroin; even pot smoking would probably be sketchy due to the smoking aspect.
Furthermore, there's a lot of hype -- we prescribe MILLIONS of people amphetamines and opioids every day without mass addiction problems. To the extent there are problems they are driven by the illegality of the drugs or the news media's hype machine.
And if you are a Pillar of the Economy business (100000+ headcount) you will get to write the law yourself and select who will serve in Congress to implement your law.
I think the environmental thing is going to bite the planned obsolescence business strategy in the ass ultimately.
I think environmental regulations on hazardous materials, manufacturers being forced to take back and recycle old products, and possibly even cost of materials will make it harder and harder to release intentionally obsoleted gadgets.
Some of this cost can be passed on to end users, but much of it can't be and I've read editorial content from environmental advocates that even suggests that device makers be forced to support devices with software updates and technical support for longer periods of time in a bid to make it unprofitable to obsolete them so quickly.
The other side of this coin, though, is that while there are jobs that a 5-10 year old device can still do and manufacturers do push planned obsolescence, the primary reason these things have gone obsolete is that their newer versions are just so much better in terms of performance. My kid could keep using his P4 for a long time but even basic stuff gets sucky -- web sites are SO javascript dependent anymore that unless you can throw 4 GB RAM and a couple of cores at web pages, you do get shitty performance.
The goal is not gun registration, the goal is to create a complex patchwork of laws that makes exercising legal gun ownership much more onerous for both buyer and seller.
They want a situation where if you're not an active-duty member of law enforcement and you have any encounter with the police they can seize your firearm and arrest you on firearm charges even if there is no other chargeable offense.
Ultimately enough people will stop wanting to exercise their gun rights because who wants to get pulled over for a minor traffic offense pulling out of a gas station on their way to the gun range only to be prosecuted for illegal transportation of a firearm (the law will allow you to drive from your home to the range, but deviating from that path -- the gas station a half-mile out of the way -- is considered a crime because now you're just driving around with a firearm in your car).
It's largely the same reason for continued marijuana prohibition. Outside of a handful of small-town religious zealots, there's no a street cop in the world who thinks that marijuana prohibition does anything EXCEPT provide a great way to harass people, search their belongings and fish for other reasons to arrest them.
I'm not arguing the dangers of planned-obsolescence/DRM/black box computing at all (despite the two iPads and 3 iPhones we have here) at all.
I still build my own PCs, but for a whole bunch of reasons I kind of leave them as built anymore.
I'm fine with my existing two year old Core i5 system -- but I kind of threw some money at it when I built it and it's paid off -- SSD boot disk, 2 TB Raid1 storage, 16 GB RAM.
When I'm done, my young son gets them and by then he's thrilled. He's just about to get a slightly overhauled Q6600 system to replace the Pentium 4 box he has now.
The last couple of systems I've built I get a half-assed urge to just buy one and be done with it -- I price out what i want as parts and then compare the same specs to a Dell and keep on building...
I was relatively late to the build your own PC craze, I built my first one in 1995 after about 8 years of being a Mac owner.
But since that time I have found relatively little worthwhile "upgradability" in my systems. I do remember adding a 3DFX card to my Pentium-166 system and replacing a couple of video cards (in the last 2-3 years) whose fans have quit.
When I built systems I tried to get the best bang for my buck out of my CPU, buying just high enough in the product lineup that my parts were "better" but below the point where they wanted $800 for a CPU because it was in the absolute top tier (eg, the P 180s and 200s were much more expensive than the performance gain, and the P133 savings didn't justify the performance loss from P166). Eventually the P200 became cheap enough that I *could* have upgraded, but the cost wasn't worth the nominal performance increase, especially when I was 3-6 months away from a whole new architecture with all kinds of performance improvements (PCI, PII/PIII, etc).
Although that example seems dated, it's always been like that -- there are either limited upgrades (dead end of a chipset/CPU) or upgrades that hardly seem worth the hassle when a new architecture is available with 10x the performance.
I get it that there are guys that chase the latest & greatest video card or who start with the lowest end CPU for a chipset and then serially upgrade via eBay or other bargain hunting, but my interests are more aligned with what's ON the computer rather than upgrading for the sake of a 5% clock rate jump.
When I think of SWAT teams in the US, I think of a paramilitary kind of force.
Even at the city level, the Minneapolis SWAT team wears military gear, carries full-auto submachine guns and assault rifles and has access to all the usual cop assault tools like tear gas and flash bang grenades. I don't think the locals get into stuff like explosives (grenades, shape charges, etc).
But at the federal level I would think there wouldn't be a whole lot unavailable, including serious breaching tools including shaped charges or cutting lances.
The NRA is constantly lobbying for the EXISTING gun control laws we already have to be enforced. One of the first things that eliminated in a plea bargain are felon-in-possession violations or laws that make it a crime to commit a crime with a firearm. Seldom or never are felons convicted of a crime involving a gun ever indicted or prosecuted in federal court on the federal versions of these crimes.
Many of the newer gun control laws suggested, even the so-called compromise laws, are overbroad and rely greatly on discretion by the police and prosecutors to keep from prosecuting law abiding gun owners. In many cases they seem not directed at crime control but in making legal gun ownership burdensome and complicated, often creating a "catch 22" situation where doing normal, legal things with a gun (transporting it to a firing range) become potentially criminal (because you deviated from your trip to buy gas, for example).
I don't know why you think having the FBI pop by your house and ask you about your arsenal could ever be interpreted as helpful, and I'm pretty sure the FBI is not in the business of being supportive of your child rearing efforts.
I have never heard of the NRA being against any kind of gun owership. I don't think the NRA advocates for or has a position on individual ownership of destructive devices (canons, rocket launchers, etc) but they certainly are supportive of LEGAL ownership of any and all firearms.
The real problem with ethanol was never the fact that it was a bad fuel, but that the agriculture lobby got subsides enabled for it AND got mandates in at least ag states that retail fuel be blended with a certain percentage of it.
This both made it artificially cheap for producers, who could pay closer to market costs for corn, thus encouraging farmers to grown more corn (and widen the political support for subsidies) AND create an artificial demand for it, thus creating an artificial floor for pricing.
Nothing distorts an economy like subsidizing production and mandating consumption.
I think biofuels probably have a place in the upcoming 100 years, but the only thing that should be subsidized is research and small-scale trials. The technologies and systems that get commercialized should happen because they're independently viable from a cost/use perspective, not because ADM, the Farm Bureau and ag state Senators benefit from it.
Personally, I'd like to see some kind of synergy between wind power, hydrogen and biofuels. Wind is common in ag areas (where the bio-inputs are, including ag waste which is marginal for yield if a lot of shipping is involved), wind produces a surplus the grid can't always use, biofuel energy balance could be more positive if some of the energy inputs were "free" (surplus wind's electricity or hydrogen produced from its electricity).
At a minimum we could be talking about cutting the energy inputs for food production and a more localized and sustainable energy cycle.
I don't think apps are written for the slowest device. My experience with Apple IOS and devices of mixed age is that over time the apps seem to target faster and faster CPUs, either by doing more things or adding new features.
Every so often I grab an old iPhone 4 we use for a home phone and try to use Instacast and it about locks up updating 4-5 podcasts, yet it's like glass on my iPhone 5.
I think the irony thing has been around longer than that. Even the relatively genuine hipsters of the 1980s had an affectation for 1950s cultural paraphernalia but in an "ironic" mode.
The Replacements have a song from 1983 that underscores it perfectly --
Everybody at your party they don't look distressed Everybody's dressing funny Color me impressed...
I would argue that the "hipster" concept was ultimately destroyed by the Internet, and the commercialization of "alternative" music that took place in the late 80s/early 90s.
Prior to that, you kind of had to have a yen for weirdness to even understand the hipster concept. Now all you have to do is read the internet and have facial hair.
Slashdot Mirror
Is less about outsourcing and more about pay rates and employer expectations.
http://www.startribune.com/business/164935926.html?refer=y
There was another story in this paper as well about this I couldn't find the link to -- a survey found that the "problem" wasn't a lack of workers, it was the low wages and working conditions that kept employers from recruiting workers.
Training is an issue as well -- employers have a desire to hire "ready for work" employers, even though the employees they often want need to have extensive education and experience with complex, high tech manufacturing systems that are difficult to get experience with...without working on one.
It's a self-perpetuating problem for employers. As long as they refuse to invest in training and paying salaries, they will have a shortage of workers.
I also think they have another problem -- the culture of manufacturing and blue collar employment generally. Manufacturing jobs have historically been "dumb" jobs -- the kind of work some high school dropout or grad got working on an assembly line turning a bolt, adding a part or whatever. Little to no skill, no education. Treat them awful and throw them away, we can always plug another body into this. It's why much of this COULD be outsourced -- there's little difference between an ex-jock who barely got a high school diploma and some third world country mouse who moved to the city.
Unions boosted the wages of these jobs until the early 70s, but there was always this cultural gulf between "labor" and "management"" and usually open hostility, as management sought to screw labor any way they could, and labor sought to take management for maximum compensation and minimum work. Labor were people to be piss-tested, searched and yelled at, and sic your security goons on if they step out of line.
Now we're at this point where the people manufacturers need aren't the dumb HS grads or third world peons, they are educated people with extensive skills, but business keep perpetuating this fucked up class warfare kind of culture, with the working conditions and pay to go with it. No wonder they can't find people -- anyone self-aware enough and smart enough to do this kind of work wants nothing to do with being treated as little more than a slave.
If we would have a manufacturing environment that treated the skilled workers more like white collar office workers and paid them that way, I can only imagine the talent pool would grow a lot deeper and the productivity would skyrocket.
It strikes me that the primary value to cloud operators of non-interoperable clouds is vendor lock-in -- once you're on their cloud, migrating to another is more work, downtime, etc. It forces you stay put unless you REALLY want to change.
However, a truly interoperable cloud environment sounds like a race to the bottom for vendors -- who can be the cheapest?
It's not hard to see people running management software that figures out what the cheapest vendor is on some regular basis and doing migrations to other vendors as soon as there's enough price break to make it worth what downtime there might be or to build a presence in many compatible clouds, keep your data synced and just move your workloads to whoever's cheapest.
It's not hard to see this kind of thing happening in near real-time for people with the management tools and architecture.
You're generally right, but the American version of Life on Mars wasn't bad on it's own merits, even if it was somehow not as good as the British version.
At least the cast was decent -- it seemed unusual to have Keitel, Mol, Imperioli all on a network TV series.
For network devices, what about some compromise that combined some part of the serial number and last 3 bytes of the MAC address? Most devices have the serial number machine readable and presumably the MAC address is as well.
This would make guessing far more complicated, especially if there was some effort made in production to "randomize" serial number and MAC address relationships so they didn't march in linear lockstep.
These values should be easily found on the equipment if there was any question as to what they were, and the ROM could be configured in such a way that any "factory reset" would use this combination automatically.
This wouldn't be perfect security -- brute forcing attacks would probably be less hard as the MAC and S/N space would be known, but with a non-linear association between serial numbers and MACs it might still be time-consuming -- a 12 character password of even known value ranges but semi-random relationships would still be time-consuming.
Dinitrous Monoxide however is quite a laughing matter.
To some extent, taxes are zero sum. The government has an operating expense it has to meet and imposes taxation to meet its expenses. Those who shelter their income from taxation boost the tax paid by those unable to shelter their income as the government raises marginal rates to meet their revenue needs.
Google takes a holistic approach to employee compensation, which includes workplace benefits such as free meals, since it makes the job more attractive than cash alone might.
This amounts to an employee benefit of more than a de minimis value (like, say, free coffee or sodas), which makes it more like income for the employee, which should make it a taxable compensatory benefit.
So when a Google employee gets income in the form of meals without paying income taxes on it, they are in effect sheltering their income from taxes and shifting the tax burden to taxpayers not receiving tax free meals.
I get that there's probably a lot of wireless expansion happening in the less developed world, but is wireless -- in terms of cell sites -- expanding that rapidly in the developed world, where there's already a fair amount of cell coverage density?
And is LTE more energy intensive for cell towers? I would have assumed that over time the energy consumption of a cell site would stay about flat over time as transmission technologies got more efficient (ie, superior signaling, better low-power modes for fewer handset status updates) and the equipment itself increased its processing power relative to its actual power consumption (faster CPUs, better integration at the IC level, etc).
Somehow I don't see a major expansion in terms of number of cell sites in the US. I'm sure there is growth, but I'd also expect that most of the capital is going to technology upgrades for LTE, improved backhaul, etc.
There was a story about this exact kind of thing on NPR's Planet Money:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/12/04/166514067/episode-420-the-legal-marijuana-business
They talk to legitimate business people trying to run a dispensary and handling money is a huge problem for them. It's almost nearly impossible to get a commercial bank account and really complicated to try to run it on a cash basis. The banks are paranoid because its illegal at a Federal level and there's all kinds of ways for the Feds make pain -- money laundering laws, revoking Federal bank charters, seizing assets, and so forth. Suppliers, landlords, employees, the government, customers -- everybody wants to get paid and cash is really clumsy and sometimes not an option.
And of course, they want to be consumer friendly and take plastic, but good luck without banking. I may be remembering this wrong, but they use the gimmick of the low-rent cash machine which will also do purchases-as-cash-advance-for-a-fee so credit card users can "buy" without a cash advance from the credit card company's perspective.
At the end of the day, a pot dispensary should be no different than any other specialty retailer -- doing payroll mostly electronically with printed checks for those who want them, a line of credit at the bank, and various accounts to park cash in or fund check writing, and taking all the usual plastic money from customers.
I can't help but think that the pot business now is something like the Internet was circa about 1991. There was a sense it was going to be a big deal and there was going to be a lot of money made, but nobody quite knew how to do it right away.
And like the Internet, I'll be looking back 20 years from now amazed at how much money has been made off it and how it's universally accepted, just like the Internet.
I don't want to run fucking antispamware on my phone.
Telephone exchange operators should be running this software and doing some basic sanity checks on calls entering their networks from the outside of them.
Individuals or businesses abusing trunk lines should be barred from future service. CLECs and other carrier-like entities who permit abuse should lose network access as well.
What boggles my mind about all this is the carriers standing around with their dicks in their hands with a "gee, there's nothing we can do..." attitude.
The FCC should impose fines on the carriers, too, and then we'll see how quickly they can fix this problem.
...follow the money trail and file a RICO suit against EVERYONE involved in the money trail, especially managers and executives or anyone else who would have "created a climate accepting of working with illegal businesses".
Perp walk those fuckers on national news, naming names and home towns.
If we ratchet up the fear factor high enough, nobody will work with these assholes anymore, and if you can't collect money what's the point? Sure, some politically minded assholes will still robocall ("Stop Obama!", "Legalize Gay Marriage", etc), but if it doesn't make any money, nobody will do it.
There's a big chunk of the "legitimate" economy at work here to keep these guys going -- if we take away their 2% take and make sure some of them do 20 in Lewisberg while desperately holding the soap then this will dampen the urge to dabble at the fringes of the economy.
Every time the concept of legalizing drugs is raised someone raises the issue of "widespread use" and usually of drugs with a high addiction potential.
Yet these people never explain why millions of people with no inclination to drink more than a couple of glasses of wine or beer a week -- despite the fact that it's legal, cheap and broadly accepted to drink more than that -- would suddenly start having interest in heroin, amphetamines or cocaine.
The only way I can explain this happening is "legalizing" being made semantically equivalent to "mass commercialization and marketing" and the general public suddenly being largely tricked in consuming products with these drugs blended in ("Mountain Dew Super Rush!") or in new formulations ("Tylenol UltraPain, now with 10 mg oxycodone!") or as "new" products with their real content hidden.
First of all, no legalization regime for anything stronger than marijuana would ever allow for these substances -- all accepted as drugs -- to be added to existing consumer products, and the FDA would likely NOT approve them being added to OTC drug formulations, either., even under existing law. Secondly, I don't think even the biggest legalize-everything advocates would back the kind of crass commercialism we have now, even at the limited levels permitted for alcohol sales.
Most importantly, the social stigma of these drugs wouldn't go away overnight if ever, really. I can drink a beer at a suburban kids birthday party, it seems highly unlikely though that in anything less than a generation I'd be able to snort a couple of lines of coke or heroin; even pot smoking would probably be sketchy due to the smoking aspect.
Furthermore, there's a lot of hype -- we prescribe MILLIONS of people amphetamines and opioids every day without mass addiction problems. To the extent there are problems they are driven by the illegality of the drugs or the news media's hype machine.
And if you are a Pillar of the Economy business (100000+ headcount) you will get to write the law yourself and select who will serve in Congress to implement your law.
I think the environmental thing is going to bite the planned obsolescence business strategy in the ass ultimately.
I think environmental regulations on hazardous materials, manufacturers being forced to take back and recycle old products, and possibly even cost of materials will make it harder and harder to release intentionally obsoleted gadgets.
Some of this cost can be passed on to end users, but much of it can't be and I've read editorial content from environmental advocates that even suggests that device makers be forced to support devices with software updates and technical support for longer periods of time in a bid to make it unprofitable to obsolete them so quickly.
The other side of this coin, though, is that while there are jobs that a 5-10 year old device can still do and manufacturers do push planned obsolescence, the primary reason these things have gone obsolete is that their newer versions are just so much better in terms of performance. My kid could keep using his P4 for a long time but even basic stuff gets sucky -- web sites are SO javascript dependent anymore that unless you can throw 4 GB RAM and a couple of cores at web pages, you do get shitty performance.
The goal is not gun registration, the goal is to create a complex patchwork of laws that makes exercising legal gun ownership much more onerous for both buyer and seller.
They want a situation where if you're not an active-duty member of law enforcement and you have any encounter with the police they can seize your firearm and arrest you on firearm charges even if there is no other chargeable offense.
Ultimately enough people will stop wanting to exercise their gun rights because who wants to get pulled over for a minor traffic offense pulling out of a gas station on their way to the gun range only to be prosecuted for illegal transportation of a firearm (the law will allow you to drive from your home to the range, but deviating from that path -- the gas station a half-mile out of the way -- is considered a crime because now you're just driving around with a firearm in your car).
It's largely the same reason for continued marijuana prohibition. Outside of a handful of small-town religious zealots, there's no a street cop in the world who thinks that marijuana prohibition does anything EXCEPT provide a great way to harass people, search their belongings and fish for other reasons to arrest them.
I'm not arguing the dangers of planned-obsolescence/DRM/black box computing at all (despite the two iPads and 3 iPhones we have here) at all.
I still build my own PCs, but for a whole bunch of reasons I kind of leave them as built anymore.
I'm fine with my existing two year old Core i5 system -- but I kind of threw some money at it when I built it and it's paid off -- SSD boot disk, 2 TB Raid1 storage, 16 GB RAM.
When I'm done, my young son gets them and by then he's thrilled. He's just about to get a slightly overhauled Q6600 system to replace the Pentium 4 box he has now.
The last couple of systems I've built I get a half-assed urge to just buy one and be done with it -- I price out what i want as parts and then compare the same specs to a Dell and keep on building...
But how will the "editors" account for the 80% lost productivity last week not to mention the "team dinners" they ran tabs on?
It was all to plan the "massively funny" April 1st edition and EVERYBODY got to get their item in since they couldn't decide whose was best.
I was relatively late to the build your own PC craze, I built my first one in 1995 after about 8 years of being a Mac owner.
But since that time I have found relatively little worthwhile "upgradability" in my systems. I do remember adding a 3DFX card to my Pentium-166 system and replacing a couple of video cards (in the last 2-3 years) whose fans have quit.
When I built systems I tried to get the best bang for my buck out of my CPU, buying just high enough in the product lineup that my parts were "better" but below the point where they wanted $800 for a CPU because it was in the absolute top tier (eg, the P 180s and 200s were much more expensive than the performance gain, and the P133 savings didn't justify the performance loss from P166). Eventually the P200 became cheap enough that I *could* have upgraded, but the cost wasn't worth the nominal performance increase, especially when I was 3-6 months away from a whole new architecture with all kinds of performance improvements (PCI, PII/PIII, etc).
Although that example seems dated, it's always been like that -- there are either limited upgrades (dead end of a chipset/CPU) or upgrades that hardly seem worth the hassle when a new architecture is available with 10x the performance.
I get it that there are guys that chase the latest & greatest video card or who start with the lowest end CPU for a chipset and then serially upgrade via eBay or other bargain hunting, but my interests are more aligned with what's ON the computer rather than upgrading for the sake of a 5% clock rate jump.
When I think of SWAT teams in the US, I think of a paramilitary kind of force.
Even at the city level, the Minneapolis SWAT team wears military gear, carries full-auto submachine guns and assault rifles and has access to all the usual cop assault tools like tear gas and flash bang grenades. I don't think the locals get into stuff like explosives (grenades, shape charges, etc).
But at the federal level I would think there wouldn't be a whole lot unavailable, including serious breaching tools including shaped charges or cutting lances.
Why not add a link to the actual images on NASA's stie, instead of a fucking link to some ad/tracking/whoring site like Gizmodo?
The NRA is constantly lobbying for the EXISTING gun control laws we already have to be enforced. One of the first things that eliminated in a plea bargain are felon-in-possession violations or laws that make it a crime to commit a crime with a firearm. Seldom or never are felons convicted of a crime involving a gun ever indicted or prosecuted in federal court on the federal versions of these crimes.
Many of the newer gun control laws suggested, even the so-called compromise laws, are overbroad and rely greatly on discretion by the police and prosecutors to keep from prosecuting law abiding gun owners. In many cases they seem not directed at crime control but in making legal gun ownership burdensome and complicated, often creating a "catch 22" situation where doing normal, legal things with a gun (transporting it to a firing range) become potentially criminal (because you deviated from your trip to buy gas, for example).
I don't know why you think having the FBI pop by your house and ask you about your arsenal could ever be interpreted as helpful, and I'm pretty sure the FBI is not in the business of being supportive of your child rearing efforts.
I have never heard of the NRA being against any kind of gun owership. I don't think the NRA advocates for or has a position on individual ownership of destructive devices (canons, rocket launchers, etc) but they certainly are supportive of LEGAL ownership of any and all firearms.
The real problem with ethanol was never the fact that it was a bad fuel, but that the agriculture lobby got subsides enabled for it AND got mandates in at least ag states that retail fuel be blended with a certain percentage of it.
This both made it artificially cheap for producers, who could pay closer to market costs for corn, thus encouraging farmers to grown more corn (and widen the political support for subsidies) AND create an artificial demand for it, thus creating an artificial floor for pricing.
Nothing distorts an economy like subsidizing production and mandating consumption.
I think biofuels probably have a place in the upcoming 100 years, but the only thing that should be subsidized is research and small-scale trials. The technologies and systems that get commercialized should happen because they're independently viable from a cost/use perspective, not because ADM, the Farm Bureau and ag state Senators benefit from it.
Personally, I'd like to see some kind of synergy between wind power, hydrogen and biofuels. Wind is common in ag areas (where the bio-inputs are, including ag waste which is marginal for yield if a lot of shipping is involved), wind produces a surplus the grid can't always use, biofuel energy balance could be more positive if some of the energy inputs were "free" (surplus wind's electricity or hydrogen produced from its electricity).
At a minimum we could be talking about cutting the energy inputs for food production and a more localized and sustainable energy cycle.
I don't think apps are written for the slowest device. My experience with Apple IOS and devices of mixed age is that over time the apps seem to target faster and faster CPUs, either by doing more things or adding new features.
Every so often I grab an old iPhone 4 we use for a home phone and try to use Instacast and it about locks up updating 4-5 podcasts, yet it's like glass on my iPhone 5.
I think the irony thing has been around longer than that. Even the relatively genuine hipsters of the 1980s had an affectation for 1950s cultural paraphernalia but in an "ironic" mode.
The Replacements have a song from 1983 that underscores it perfectly --
Everybody at your party
they don't look distressed
Everybody's dressing funny
Color me impressed...
I would argue that the "hipster" concept was ultimately destroyed by the Internet, and the commercialization of "alternative" music that took place in the late 80s/early 90s.
Prior to that, you kind of had to have a yen for weirdness to even understand the hipster concept. Now all you have to do is read the internet and have facial hair.