I don't think quality referred to *image* quality, but to the quality of the content. People are as prone to watch C-list, shot-on-DSLR crap as they are to watch the latest critic-lauded-based-on-a-Mann-Booker-winning-novel film.
Not a single person can't tell me after spending almost the comparable amount of swiping time 'looking' for a show that it takes to actually watch one, you just finally pick something and watch it.
This is totally spot-on. I can't tell you the number of times I've (finally) had about 2.5 hours of down time and felt like a little video distraction would be a good idea and then spent 20-odd minutes looking for a movie, finally settled on one that didn't look too awful, lost interest after 20 minutes, another 10 minutes finding a second choice, only then to be disappointed with what I was watching, not being able to finish it, or whatever.
Honestly, I would likely cancel my Netflix subscription if it didn't keep some $100 cable package at bay for the rest of my family (mostly my son).
My gut instinct is that the actual best (from a quality and avoiding decision paralysis) and cheapest way to watch video entertainment is a mix of rented content and used discs from Amazon. You still have decisions to make, but they're easier to make because you have more good choices and have to make fewer forced choices. And at least for me from a time perspective, I'm guessing over a six month period I'd spend less money on used discs and a handful of rentals than Netflix.
And even if I spent slightly more, I'd get more quality entertainment time out of it and waste less time.
IMHO, the problem isn't just fake news but a broader, and longer term problem of general dishonesty in society that's been going on for decades.
* Government dishonesty since at least Viet Nam and/or Nixon. Two examples where the government actively lied and/or stretched the truth, and there are many others. This has long been internalized by many people about the honesty of government.
* General misleading nature of advertisements. We're constantly bombarded with misleading messages about every day items and we've all had experience where the product doesn't align with its promises.
* Corporate dishonesty -- outright lying. Karen Silkwood, Thalidomide, Corvair, Pinto, corporations relentlessly covering up and lying about bad products, corporate misdeeds and so forth. And these are all very old examples just to demonstrate how it has been going on for decades.
* Employer dishonesty -- The relentless messaging from management about business goals and plans for employees. How often is it true or does it end up improving employee work lives? Almost never. Most people impulsively parse and disbelieve what management tells them because it's so often the opposite of what they're told.
* The near-legal practical status of scams and cons -- We're constantly assaulted by outright dishonest people. Spam email, "card services", "free cruises". Yes, it's illegal and few people believe it at face value but there's so little effort to stop it that it seems to be legitimized as a means of doing business.
* Ideological dishonesty -- across the political spectrum all ideological advocates both embrace untruths necessary to advance their cause and discount their critics when it seems patently obvious they're not being honest.
It's not just fake news -- belief in fake news is just a symptom of the relentless, never ending crisis of honesty in our culture. Lying and misleading is so ingrained in our culture that doubting is our first impulse. So why not buy into fake news and conspiracy? Lies and conspiracies have quite often been shown to be true, why should I have any faith that person/institution X is telling the truth and not lying to me and that the conspiracy is false?
Until the Internet, the news media was actually one of the last institutions to *mostly* tell the truth -- libel laws, the business nature of actually printing news, journalism as an actual profession with a sense of ethics and some mission to tell the truth -- mostly worked against fake news, which was (in the US anyway) generally marginalized into corners of celebrity gossip or supermarket tabloids. It just wasn't practical to create fake news when you needed a press run of a million copies on a regular basis and a distribution network.
My 12 year old loves it and if given the opportunity with mine or my wife's phone, he will use it relentlessly.
I never use it except in the car to make it dial telephone numbers. When I've tried using it even for basic tasks, it gives me not-quite-useful information or just returns some web search.
After manufacture would be something of a problem, that's just under 3 years.
Of use would seem to be something less of a problem, that's 8 hours a day, every day for 8.5 years. Telly turned on at 4 pm every day and left on until midnight.
There's some segment of home users that might be affected and some institutional use cases, but that's a lot of on time and frankly in most settings where I see a TV that's been on that long it looks like shit anyway and that's non-OLEDs.
For most people it would seem like the technology would age out well before the set did.
Why not manned space exploration as the "purpose" behind what will largely be a giant make-work process anyway? It requires a ton of skills across the spectrum, from basic labor to, well, rocket science, and it has kind of a purpose which hasn't (yet) been completely politicized -- in fact, much of science fiction surrounding spacefaring is pretty utopian in terms of race and class relations.
It seems kind of ideal from a unifying propaganda perspective as well as providing people with a constructive activity.
This seems like all streamed content. A night scene at the ocean in last night's Westworld finale looked awful, full of banding artifacts. What's the point of a panel with good black levels when the content looks like a VideoCD?
... I have a hard time with the typical US notion of free speech and no censorship.
To those of us whose parents or grandparents had to live and suffer through WW2, I is pretty much unthinkable to allow someone to deny the horrors of the concentration camps and all things associated.
We didn't sacrifice a million casualties and $4 trillion in treasure for your political ideals and way of life, we sacrificed them for our political ideals and way of life, and that includes unfettered freedom of speech.
Maybe getting the card numbers (card, code, expiry) is just phase I of weakness with limited applicability for in-person transactions. Nobody asks my address at the electronics shop when I have a $800 TV in my cart.
And perhaps they have other databases that allow them to correlate incomplete card numbers with names and addresses to create useful online transactions where they info can be asked.
IMHO, the only useful solution to this is two factor RSA-style authentication. Go ahead and know all the card info, but unless you can guess the random digits it would be worthless. Pity that fraud doesn't cost VISA and merchants can build most of their costs into product pricing.
Why not just build 2 factor authentication into the card itself? They could offer a card with an in-built RSA token or a way to use a smartphone app for cards without token hardware.
Something tells me this is something we should have, but given the sparring and profiteering over getting chip enabled terminals in the US (I'm STILL swiping at many terminals). I suspect that it's not the two factor part that keeps it from happening but the terminals and merchant software costs combined with a bunch of middlemen who figure that fraud deterrence for merchants and consumers isn't their problem since they make merchants eat it, who then make consumers eat it in higher prices.
And then there's the spreadsheet guys, who predict transaction fee revenue drops from failed transactions and doom-and-gloom of lost sales pitched to merchants.
I think 3D modeling software is a big reason 3D printing hasn't been the home revolution.
I've been using computer based 2D drawing software since MacDraw in the 1980s and have used it for drafting home improvement projects, woodworking projects and floor plans. I've downloaded Sketch-Up a few times and always found myself baffled quite quickly, even tinkering with generic rectilinear shapes.
And even drawing some boxes or other regular geometric shapes doesn't get you very fair in a world of tapered curves, irregular shapes, etc, let alone the same needing accurate scale and tolerances down to the millimeter.
And it's not that it's impossible, either, but it's got a wicked learning curve over 2D just doing the drawings let alone the phase where you have to consider how you design will actually be output by the thing making it.
Strangely it's almost the blade-and-razor model in reverse. In theory, they should give you the razor handle (the easy to learn 3D design software) for free so that you'll buy the 3D printer and supplies, but I suspect that in terms of cost, the easy to use 3D modeling software is the actual expensive part and the 3D printer should be the cheap part. It's kind of like 2D design software -- an annual contract for Adobe Creative Cloud is almost more expensive than a decent color laser printer.
I thought Henry Ford was a visionary because of his business model -- an assembly line that could mass produce cars for everyone -- not because he necessarily innovated the automobile concept itself.
Musk's advancement mostly seems in the electric drivetrain, less so in the business model. He wants to do direct sales, but while it runs against the grain of the existing car sales business, existing regulation and low production volume make it appear less than revolutionary, especially when many products are sold directly buy their maker.
I think there are fair arguments about not distracting other drivers. But one thing nice about this vs. a HUD is that it actually projects imagery onto the surface you're supposedly to be looking at -- you want to focus on the road in front of you generally so seeing directional markings there is completely natural and doesn't require a change in visual focus or the distraction of having to look through a HUD's imagery to the road beyond.
Some potential ideas to make is less distracting for others -- don't display markings when another car is within a distance where they may easily see them, display markings such that they're oriented/displayed in a way meaningful to other drivers or communicate that they should be ignored. I drive through intersections many times a day with turn arrows and lane markings not relevant to me and I don't get confused.
I also wonder if there's some way of projecting them with a light color, pattern or polarization that's made more visible by filters laminated into the originating car's windshield, especially if it managed to do it such that other cars windshields acted as passive filters due to their polarization.
I think it's a great way to put information exactly where it belongs for driver visual focus. Distraction to other motorists *could* be a problem, but overall people are already visually attuned to ignore markings that are backwards or don't apply to them and their direction of travel. Roads have all kinds of markings already and nobody complains about excess street markings. And it may be possible to project them in a way that makes it difficult for other drivers to see them at all.
A wall won't stop them, but it will slow them down enough for people behind the wall to shoot them dead.
Don't be naive, if refugee/migration pressures are this severe do not think of a second that the people with will demand the invading hordes without be stopped by any means necessary.
I'm of the opinion that it's happening already. We argue around the margins about immigration, pretending it's about jobs, racism or some other bullshit but I think at the heart of it people really are nervous about long-term resource access. It's low level and you can easily rationalize away any kind of urgency about it, but I think the level of news coverage about refugees into Europe, the noticeable increase in Hispanic populations in the US over the last 10-20 years, etc is invoking something of a panic mindset.
We laugh about Trump's wall now for all the obvious reasons but it wouldn't surprise me at all if fortifying the border specifically against mass refugee influxes doesn't become something more than a fringe idea.
I'm on board with most of that, but if economics was a good enough explanation we wouldn't have seen the DEA making opiates much harder to obtain -- more intensive prescription databases to get doctor shoppers, more intensive audits of prescribing physicians, and the rescheduling of hydrocodone from III to II. The irony, of course, is that it has jacked up street prices and moved many low-level pill users accustomed to uniform dosing to street heroin, which despite DEA enforcement has become cheaper than made-in-the-USA pills, and with all the worse addiction and overdose outcome you'd expect.
I'm more inclined to think that the DEA was largely a political creation designed to attack the counterculture of its founding era, using criminalization of LSD and marijuana as an excuse for law enforcement action. This I think goes a long way towards explaining the DEAs aggressive moves against any substance with recreational value.
Given that the FDA's purpose is to approve drugs for their therapeutic value, why don't they have the ability to overrule the DEA? Why does the DEA have the authority to block access to drugs with a compelling case for therapeutic value to the extent that you can't even perform research to prove their therapeutic value?
I mean, I can't escape the (only slightly) tinfoil hat explanation that they do it to perpetuate and expand their power and ensure they have a near immutable list of banned substances to justify their power and budget. And of course they hang onto marijuana as schedule I because it provides the vast bulk of "illegal" drug use, and complete legalization might usher into public consciousness the idea that the entire premise of the DEA is suspect.
It seems highly likely that most drugs with a recreational potential are likely to have some kind of therapeutic use as well. I guess we're just fortunate that opiates, amphetamines and tranquilizers had a long and mostly irrefutable clinical history of therapeutic value before the DEA existed or they would have long ago scheduled them away.
A real thin client deployment should have full management backing and a concrete criteria for establishing "need" for a thick PC. Don't meet the criteria? No thick PC, and it's not a line management override decision any more than carpeting or bathroom fixtures is.
And the "need" for thick PCs can easily be met by something like a micro form factor machine in many cases, because "need" will ultimately boil down to something like multiple displays or USB connectivity for 90% of grey area cases. Anyone with a functional need beyond that (3D rendering, massive storage, CPU or RAM) would be meet the thick PC selection criteria to begin with.
Any company not willing to make these decisions is wasting money on a thin client deployment, but if they do I don't see why it wouldn't succeed.
I think most of this will happen (wireless 10gb less likely unless some scheme for 40 gbe over copper becomes a reality, you have to feed the APs after all).
But why would it change most of the corporate desktop market? You won't bring your phone to work and do company business on it, they will still require/want you to use their equipment at work.
I'm actually surprised by this point that the whole business market hasn't gone thin client/RDP by this point. It's been materially viable for while, but maybe Microsoft has kept licensing costs so high that not enough organizations are willing to bet on intangible ROI gains from thin client to pay the licensing penalty over desktop. And of course licensing costs for RDP are kept high to keep desktop OS and application license revenue flowing in.
And it may end up that market distortion by vendors cripples mobile-as-desktop ultimately anyway, as it would generally mean far less desktop/laptop sales. I mean, I own a desktop, a laptop and a phone and if my phone really could do what my laptop does I might not own one. I went the other way when my iPad got old (and apple still refused BT mouse support) and got a laptop because a tablet didn't do enough because they vendor didn't want it to.
Fear mongering is a gift to the fake news industry. Because it's speculation based on fact, it's technically not false. But it's also usually about three decimal places past the zombie apocalypse in probability.
As long as a segment of Democratic base continues to indulge in extreme paranoia, the news industry across all strata will continue pumping out stories to indulge this paranoia.
I predict next we'll hear that Mike Pence will be personally performing abortions on pregnant transgender people because the bible says it's ok.
I also think the established media seemed to prop up Clinton throughout the campaign.
I think it's mostly because she was kind of the perfect candidate for them. The aura of the Bill Clinton presidency, she's a woman, and she's kind of the archetype of the competent, well-educated technocrat that liberal, college educated journalists believe makes government effective.
She's literally the projection of their ideal candidate, how can they not fall for her?
We will end up adopting this and already are at the margins, with car insurance rates often being tied to credit scores in addition to driving records.
The power elite generally like what they see in China -- a system of enforced social standards, a system of laws backed by an authoritarian political system heavily influenced by money, and the ability to suppress dissent with the barrel of an AK-47. As long as the wealthy are able to influence the power elite and maintain economic status, what's not for them to like about China's system?
This is just another attempt to define, in threatening terms, another risk for smoking marijuana. We already *know* that smoking marijuana isn't risk free and for some people can be even riskier.
But all of this is a distraction -- marijuana prohibitionists want, and actually need, the debate for legalization to be oriented around the *safety* of marijuana use, both demanding an artificial high standard of safety not applied to other substances and trying to demonstrate unique and insidious risks from marijuana use.
But this isn't really what legalization should be about. We have ample scientific and more importantly, long-term public use, evidence of the relative safety of marijuana. The debate about legalization is about the *failed* nature of criminal prohibition as public policy. Prohibition has been an utter failure, costing trillions of dollars, sacrificing civil liberties, poisoning the relationship between the police and the public, discrediting public health warnings on more dangerous drugs, and all the the while totally and utterly failing to deliver anything remotely resembling the elimination of marijuana use.
It doesn't work. It costs a fortune. Trying to make it work erodes civil liberties. Nobody believes anyone who spins scare stories about marijuana. Prohibition of marijuana is one of the worst public policies advanced by every possible measure.
I can't remember the title, but what I posted largely came from a somewhat academic history of drug use in America I read last year.
Another interesting factoid -- smoking opium was the predominant form of illicit opioid use into the late 1920s, despite the obvious notion that more concentrated preparations like laudanum, morphine and heroin had been widely available and generally unrestricted until 1914. Most notably smoking opium remained dominant even after the restrictions of the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act of 1914.
The author cited a number of reasons for it, from existing supply and distribution networks to the relatively high costs associated with synthesized preparations leaving them oriented towards upper class addicts, who were mostly maintenance users who had obtained the habit due from generally legitimate health conditions otherwise untreatable.
The most interesting argument he made for smoking opium's durability was user preference. A smoking opium habit was more manageable due to its reduced strength relative to purified morphine or heroin, and smoking opium required somewhat complex preparation techniques that led many to dependent on opium dens.
What I find interesting about that is that many drug prohibitions often make the problems worse the more successful they are. Raw opium is harder to surreptitiously traffic, and as prohibitions become more intensive, supply and use become oriented to more concentrated formulations volumetrically easier to smuggle. In other words, we're better off managing a drug's less concentrated variation because prohibition leads to its more concentrated use which has vastly more significant negative effects. A 1000 opium addicts are easier to deal with than 100 heroin addicts.
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I don't think quality referred to *image* quality, but to the quality of the content. People are as prone to watch C-list, shot-on-DSLR crap as they are to watch the latest critic-lauded-based-on-a-Mann-Booker-winning-novel film.
Not a single person can't tell me after spending almost the comparable amount of swiping time 'looking' for a show that it takes to actually watch one, you just finally pick something and watch it.
This is totally spot-on. I can't tell you the number of times I've (finally) had about 2.5 hours of down time and felt like a little video distraction would be a good idea and then spent 20-odd minutes looking for a movie, finally settled on one that didn't look too awful, lost interest after 20 minutes, another 10 minutes finding a second choice, only then to be disappointed with what I was watching, not being able to finish it, or whatever.
Honestly, I would likely cancel my Netflix subscription if it didn't keep some $100 cable package at bay for the rest of my family (mostly my son).
My gut instinct is that the actual best (from a quality and avoiding decision paralysis) and cheapest way to watch video entertainment is a mix of rented content and used discs from Amazon. You still have decisions to make, but they're easier to make because you have more good choices and have to make fewer forced choices. And at least for me from a time perspective, I'm guessing over a six month period I'd spend less money on used discs and a handful of rentals than Netflix.
And even if I spent slightly more, I'd get more quality entertainment time out of it and waste less time.
IMHO, the problem isn't just fake news but a broader, and longer term problem of general dishonesty in society that's been going on for decades.
* Government dishonesty since at least Viet Nam and/or Nixon. Two examples where the government actively lied and/or stretched the truth, and there are many others. This has long been internalized by many people about the honesty of government.
* General misleading nature of advertisements. We're constantly bombarded with misleading messages about every day items and we've all had experience where the product doesn't align with its promises.
* Corporate dishonesty -- outright lying. Karen Silkwood, Thalidomide, Corvair, Pinto, corporations relentlessly covering up and lying about bad products, corporate misdeeds and so forth. And these are all very old examples just to demonstrate how it has been going on for decades.
* Employer dishonesty -- The relentless messaging from management about business goals and plans for employees. How often is it true or does it end up improving employee work lives? Almost never. Most people impulsively parse and disbelieve what management tells them because it's so often the opposite of what they're told.
* The near-legal practical status of scams and cons -- We're constantly assaulted by outright dishonest people. Spam email, "card services", "free cruises". Yes, it's illegal and few people believe it at face value but there's so little effort to stop it that it seems to be legitimized as a means of doing business.
* Ideological dishonesty -- across the political spectrum all ideological advocates both embrace untruths necessary to advance their cause and discount their critics when it seems patently obvious they're not being honest.
It's not just fake news -- belief in fake news is just a symptom of the relentless, never ending crisis of honesty in our culture. Lying and misleading is so ingrained in our culture that doubting is our first impulse. So why not buy into fake news and conspiracy? Lies and conspiracies have quite often been shown to be true, why should I have any faith that person/institution X is telling the truth and not lying to me and that the conspiracy is false?
Until the Internet, the news media was actually one of the last institutions to *mostly* tell the truth -- libel laws, the business nature of actually printing news, journalism as an actual profession with a sense of ethics and some mission to tell the truth -- mostly worked against fake news, which was (in the US anyway) generally marginalized into corners of celebrity gossip or supermarket tabloids. It just wasn't practical to create fake news when you needed a press run of a million copies on a regular basis and a distribution network.
My 12 year old loves it and if given the opportunity with mine or my wife's phone, he will use it relentlessly.
I never use it except in the car to make it dial telephone numbers. When I've tried using it even for basic tasks, it gives me not-quite-useful information or just returns some web search.
25k hours after manufacture or 25k hours of use?
After manufacture would be something of a problem, that's just under 3 years.
Of use would seem to be something less of a problem, that's 8 hours a day, every day for 8.5 years. Telly turned on at 4 pm every day and left on until midnight.
There's some segment of home users that might be affected and some institutional use cases, but that's a lot of on time and frankly in most settings where I see a TV that's been on that long it looks like shit anyway and that's non-OLEDs.
For most people it would seem like the technology would age out well before the set did.
Why not manned space exploration as the "purpose" behind what will largely be a giant make-work process anyway? It requires a ton of skills across the spectrum, from basic labor to, well, rocket science, and it has kind of a purpose which hasn't (yet) been completely politicized -- in fact, much of science fiction surrounding spacefaring is pretty utopian in terms of race and class relations.
It seems kind of ideal from a unifying propaganda perspective as well as providing people with a constructive activity.
This seems like all streamed content. A night scene at the ocean in last night's Westworld finale looked awful, full of banding artifacts. What's the point of a panel with good black levels when the content looks like a VideoCD?
... I have a hard time with the typical US notion of free speech and no censorship.
To those of us whose parents or grandparents had to live and suffer through WW2, I is pretty much unthinkable to allow someone to deny the horrors of the concentration camps and all things associated.
We didn't sacrifice a million casualties and $4 trillion in treasure for your political ideals and way of life, we sacrificed them for our political ideals and way of life, and that includes unfettered freedom of speech.
Maybe getting the card numbers (card, code, expiry) is just phase I of weakness with limited applicability for in-person transactions. Nobody asks my address at the electronics shop when I have a $800 TV in my cart.
And perhaps they have other databases that allow them to correlate incomplete card numbers with names and addresses to create useful online transactions where they info can be asked.
IMHO, the only useful solution to this is two factor RSA-style authentication. Go ahead and know all the card info, but unless you can guess the random digits it would be worthless. Pity that fraud doesn't cost VISA and merchants can build most of their costs into product pricing.
Why not just build 2 factor authentication into the card itself? They could offer a card with an in-built RSA token or a way to use a smartphone app for cards without token hardware.
Something tells me this is something we should have, but given the sparring and profiteering over getting chip enabled terminals in the US (I'm STILL swiping at many terminals). I suspect that it's not the two factor part that keeps it from happening but the terminals and merchant software costs combined with a bunch of middlemen who figure that fraud deterrence for merchants and consumers isn't their problem since they make merchants eat it, who then make consumers eat it in higher prices.
And then there's the spreadsheet guys, who predict transaction fee revenue drops from failed transactions and doom-and-gloom of lost sales pitched to merchants.
I think 3D modeling software is a big reason 3D printing hasn't been the home revolution.
I've been using computer based 2D drawing software since MacDraw in the 1980s and have used it for drafting home improvement projects, woodworking projects and floor plans. I've downloaded Sketch-Up a few times and always found myself baffled quite quickly, even tinkering with generic rectilinear shapes.
And even drawing some boxes or other regular geometric shapes doesn't get you very fair in a world of tapered curves, irregular shapes, etc, let alone the same needing accurate scale and tolerances down to the millimeter.
And it's not that it's impossible, either, but it's got a wicked learning curve over 2D just doing the drawings let alone the phase where you have to consider how you design will actually be output by the thing making it.
Strangely it's almost the blade-and-razor model in reverse. In theory, they should give you the razor handle (the easy to learn 3D design software) for free so that you'll buy the 3D printer and supplies, but I suspect that in terms of cost, the easy to use 3D modeling software is the actual expensive part and the 3D printer should be the cheap part. It's kind of like 2D design software -- an annual contract for Adobe Creative Cloud is almost more expensive than a decent color laser printer.
I thought Henry Ford was a visionary because of his business model -- an assembly line that could mass produce cars for everyone -- not because he necessarily innovated the automobile concept itself.
Musk's advancement mostly seems in the electric drivetrain, less so in the business model. He wants to do direct sales, but while it runs against the grain of the existing car sales business, existing regulation and low production volume make it appear less than revolutionary, especially when many products are sold directly buy their maker.
I think there are fair arguments about not distracting other drivers. But one thing nice about this vs. a HUD is that it actually projects imagery onto the surface you're supposedly to be looking at -- you want to focus on the road in front of you generally so seeing directional markings there is completely natural and doesn't require a change in visual focus or the distraction of having to look through a HUD's imagery to the road beyond.
Some potential ideas to make is less distracting for others -- don't display markings when another car is within a distance where they may easily see them, display markings such that they're oriented/displayed in a way meaningful to other drivers or communicate that they should be ignored. I drive through intersections many times a day with turn arrows and lane markings not relevant to me and I don't get confused.
I also wonder if there's some way of projecting them with a light color, pattern or polarization that's made more visible by filters laminated into the originating car's windshield, especially if it managed to do it such that other cars windshields acted as passive filters due to their polarization.
I think it's a great way to put information exactly where it belongs for driver visual focus. Distraction to other motorists *could* be a problem, but overall people are already visually attuned to ignore markings that are backwards or don't apply to them and their direction of travel. Roads have all kinds of markings already and nobody complains about excess street markings. And it may be possible to project them in a way that makes it difficult for other drivers to see them at all.
A wall won't stop them, but it will slow them down enough for people behind the wall to shoot them dead.
Don't be naive, if refugee/migration pressures are this severe do not think of a second that the people with will demand the invading hordes without be stopped by any means necessary.
I'm of the opinion that it's happening already. We argue around the margins about immigration, pretending it's about jobs, racism or some other bullshit but I think at the heart of it people really are nervous about long-term resource access. It's low level and you can easily rationalize away any kind of urgency about it, but I think the level of news coverage about refugees into Europe, the noticeable increase in Hispanic populations in the US over the last 10-20 years, etc is invoking something of a panic mindset.
We laugh about Trump's wall now for all the obvious reasons but it wouldn't surprise me at all if fortifying the border specifically against mass refugee influxes doesn't become something more than a fringe idea.
There was that guy they called Moses. Not sure if fundamentalist is the right word for it, but he did have a way with the sea level.
Have been spotted around Moscow with laptops.
I'm on board with most of that, but if economics was a good enough explanation we wouldn't have seen the DEA making opiates much harder to obtain -- more intensive prescription databases to get doctor shoppers, more intensive audits of prescribing physicians, and the rescheduling of hydrocodone from III to II. The irony, of course, is that it has jacked up street prices and moved many low-level pill users accustomed to uniform dosing to street heroin, which despite DEA enforcement has become cheaper than made-in-the-USA pills, and with all the worse addiction and overdose outcome you'd expect.
I'm more inclined to think that the DEA was largely a political creation designed to attack the counterculture of its founding era, using criminalization of LSD and marijuana as an excuse for law enforcement action. This I think goes a long way towards explaining the DEAs aggressive moves against any substance with recreational value.
Given that the FDA's purpose is to approve drugs for their therapeutic value, why don't they have the ability to overrule the DEA? Why does the DEA have the authority to block access to drugs with a compelling case for therapeutic value to the extent that you can't even perform research to prove their therapeutic value?
I mean, I can't escape the (only slightly) tinfoil hat explanation that they do it to perpetuate and expand their power and ensure they have a near immutable list of banned substances to justify their power and budget. And of course they hang onto marijuana as schedule I because it provides the vast bulk of "illegal" drug use, and complete legalization might usher into public consciousness the idea that the entire premise of the DEA is suspect.
It seems highly likely that most drugs with a recreational potential are likely to have some kind of therapeutic use as well. I guess we're just fortunate that opiates, amphetamines and tranquilizers had a long and mostly irrefutable clinical history of therapeutic value before the DEA existed or they would have long ago scheduled them away.
You know, there probably are a non-trivial number of people who think "that Bennett Haselton, he's a pretty insightful guy, I'm glad I know him."
That's just weak management or communication.
A real thin client deployment should have full management backing and a concrete criteria for establishing "need" for a thick PC. Don't meet the criteria? No thick PC, and it's not a line management override decision any more than carpeting or bathroom fixtures is.
And the "need" for thick PCs can easily be met by something like a micro form factor machine in many cases, because "need" will ultimately boil down to something like multiple displays or USB connectivity for 90% of grey area cases. Anyone with a functional need beyond that (3D rendering, massive storage, CPU or RAM) would be meet the thick PC selection criteria to begin with.
Any company not willing to make these decisions is wasting money on a thin client deployment, but if they do I don't see why it wouldn't succeed.
I think most of this will happen (wireless 10gb less likely unless some scheme for 40 gbe over copper becomes a reality, you have to feed the APs after all).
But why would it change most of the corporate desktop market? You won't bring your phone to work and do company business on it, they will still require/want you to use their equipment at work.
I'm actually surprised by this point that the whole business market hasn't gone thin client/RDP by this point. It's been materially viable for while, but maybe Microsoft has kept licensing costs so high that not enough organizations are willing to bet on intangible ROI gains from thin client to pay the licensing penalty over desktop. And of course licensing costs for RDP are kept high to keep desktop OS and application license revenue flowing in.
And it may end up that market distortion by vendors cripples mobile-as-desktop ultimately anyway, as it would generally mean far less desktop/laptop sales. I mean, I own a desktop, a laptop and a phone and if my phone really could do what my laptop does I might not own one. I went the other way when my iPad got old (and apple still refused BT mouse support) and got a laptop because a tablet didn't do enough because they vendor didn't want it to.
Fear mongering is a gift to the fake news industry. Because it's speculation based on fact, it's technically not false. But it's also usually about three decimal places past the zombie apocalypse in probability.
As long as a segment of Democratic base continues to indulge in extreme paranoia, the news industry across all strata will continue pumping out stories to indulge this paranoia.
I predict next we'll hear that Mike Pence will be personally performing abortions on pregnant transgender people because the bible says it's ok.
I also think the established media seemed to prop up Clinton throughout the campaign.
I think it's mostly because she was kind of the perfect candidate for them. The aura of the Bill Clinton presidency, she's a woman, and she's kind of the archetype of the competent, well-educated technocrat that liberal, college educated journalists believe makes government effective.
She's literally the projection of their ideal candidate, how can they not fall for her?
We will end up adopting this and already are at the margins, with car insurance rates often being tied to credit scores in addition to driving records.
The power elite generally like what they see in China -- a system of enforced social standards, a system of laws backed by an authoritarian political system heavily influenced by money, and the ability to suppress dissent with the barrel of an AK-47. As long as the wealthy are able to influence the power elite and maintain economic status, what's not for them to like about China's system?
This is just another attempt to define, in threatening terms, another risk for smoking marijuana. We already *know* that smoking marijuana isn't risk free and for some people can be even riskier.
But all of this is a distraction -- marijuana prohibitionists want, and actually need, the debate for legalization to be oriented around the *safety* of marijuana use, both demanding an artificial high standard of safety not applied to other substances and trying to demonstrate unique and insidious risks from marijuana use.
But this isn't really what legalization should be about. We have ample scientific and more importantly, long-term public use, evidence of the relative safety of marijuana. The debate about legalization is about the *failed* nature of criminal prohibition as public policy. Prohibition has been an utter failure, costing trillions of dollars, sacrificing civil liberties, poisoning the relationship between the police and the public, discrediting public health warnings on more dangerous drugs, and all the the while totally and utterly failing to deliver anything remotely resembling the elimination of marijuana use.
It doesn't work. It costs a fortune. Trying to make it work erodes civil liberties. Nobody believes anyone who spins scare stories about marijuana. Prohibition of marijuana is one of the worst public policies advanced by every possible measure.
I can't remember the title, but what I posted largely came from a somewhat academic history of drug use in America I read last year.
Another interesting factoid -- smoking opium was the predominant form of illicit opioid use into the late 1920s, despite the obvious notion that more concentrated preparations like laudanum, morphine and heroin had been widely available and generally unrestricted until 1914. Most notably smoking opium remained dominant even after the restrictions of the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act of 1914.
The author cited a number of reasons for it, from existing supply and distribution networks to the relatively high costs associated with synthesized preparations leaving them oriented towards upper class addicts, who were mostly maintenance users who had obtained the habit due from generally legitimate health conditions otherwise untreatable.
The most interesting argument he made for smoking opium's durability was user preference. A smoking opium habit was more manageable due to its reduced strength relative to purified morphine or heroin, and smoking opium required somewhat complex preparation techniques that led many to dependent on opium dens.
What I find interesting about that is that many drug prohibitions often make the problems worse the more successful they are. Raw opium is harder to surreptitiously traffic, and as prohibitions become more intensive, supply and use become oriented to more concentrated formulations volumetrically easier to smuggle. In other words, we're better off managing a drug's less concentrated variation because prohibition leads to its more concentrated use which has vastly more significant negative effects. A 1000 opium addicts are easier to deal with than 100 heroin addicts.