I was just reading a book on the Vikings this afternoon and happened to read the chapters on the settlement of Iceland and Greenland and thinking about space exploration.
Compared to even Norway, Iceland was a lot like Mars. Totally hostile climate, vast stretches of it totally unsuitable for human habitation. Extremely long voyage to get there in an environment -- the North Sea -- that's sure death if anything goes wrong.
Many died trying anyway, and not just all at once. It took several attempts by people who knew that previous ones had failed, fatally, to establish permanent settlements. And the ones that did fail failed for the same reasons Mars is risky -- we bring the wrong stuff and not enough of the right stuff, the climate is hostile, it's far away so you can't easily go back, and sometimes your fellow colonists turn on you and you slaughter each other *and then* die of starvation.
In many ways, at least as far as we know, the one thing we don't have to worry about on Mars is having to fight our way through hostile natives. Not only did previous migrants face long voyages to uncertain destinations, there was also the likelihood they would have to go to war with whoever they ran into -- hey, let's embark on a trip that's likely fatal simply in the conveyance we have available, to a place we might not have the knowledge or stuff to survive in, and let's do it to steal stuff from people who will fight us to the death to stop us.
Yet humans have been doing it for millennia, despite the risks and the repeated failures. It's part of what makes us human. If that wasn't part of our humanity, we'd still be eating mangoes and dipping sticks into anthills on the edge of the forest and the savanna.
I was mainly stringing together an argument for the sake of conspiracy theorizing, not establishing any kind of concrete theory that would actually explain anything.
But why can't this be just as much about Islam as anti-gay? The widespread hostility towards homosexuals in the Islamic religion and every major Islamic nation in the world isn't exactly a secret. It's not like a Muslim child of Afghani immigrants solely obtained his ideas about gays watching Fox News and the 700 Club.
(Hang on a second, while I put on my tinfoil hat...)
This is pretty conspiratorial and therefore wrong, but it's Slashdot, so I'll continue.
I'd argue that the liberal media wants to accomplish a couple of things.
One, it's an anti-gay hate crime. This allows for a gay victimhood narrative, which also allows a broad brush to paint anti-gay Christians as being partly responsible for it by promoting an anti-gay narrative (gay marriages, the bathroom thing, etc). And in this country, any incident that makes your group a victim enhances your group's political standing as deserving of special protection.
By making it an anti-gay crime, they can focus on the hate crime angle and talk around the Islamic terrorism part. Now, this guy sounds unhinged and he might also have pledged allegiance to Emperor Palpatine, SPECTRE and the Big Bad Wolf, too, so the actual ISIS part probably isn't all that significant.
But by focusing on the hate crime aspect, the mental illness part, and everything else, they can avoid talking about anything to do with Islam as a religion/theology/philosophy which encourages violence and terrorism. Downplaying Islam as a force of violence is a very high priority in the Diversity(tm) business.
And ignoring the Islamic terror part of the equation and making it "just another hate crime" also allows the narrative of gun control to be introduced -- because of course, it wasn't a planned act of terror committed by someone embracing a terror agenda. *Those* people could plant bombs, run hijacked planes into skyscrapers or numerous other non-gun acts of violence. We can't stop committed terrorists, but if we had gun ban^H^H^Hcontrol we could stop these hate-filled lunatics.
Anyway, that's my conspiratorial angle on it. I don't know how much I actually take seriously, but it's obviously going to be used first to promote gun control, then go after anyone with a non-conforming opinion on gay rights, and with enough discounting, used to go after anyone who suggests that maybe the Islamic terror thing has anything to do with it.
I almost believe the organization chart bit, but the "some people" was probably a handful of people at most and how much equipment could a single person be allowed to check out at once? A router and a switch? I doubt you're backing up a moving van to the loading dock to get one of everything.
Everything I've always heard about the CCIE certification, though, sounds like winning the lottery. I had a Cisco instructor tell us it was REALLY hard exam-wise, and the practicum was a two-day on-site affair at your own expense.
Day one was a really complex setup of multiple devices and protocols with "but that won't work" dependencies that actually could be made to work and if it didn't work just right, you were done and had to go home.
Day two was trying to fix that same setup they broke while you were gone in very subtle ways under a time deadline and knowing how it was broken.
The instructor I had said that if you passed, a recruiter from Cisco was next in line after the person who handed you your certification.
My instructor said he knew a guy (don't they all?) who had a CCIE and worked as an independent contractor making six figures for about six months of work a year.
It's probably all grossly exaggerated, of course, but it's still a complex and difficult certification that demonstrates an extremely deep networking understanding. The problem is despite that level of knowledge, how valuable is a single person? Even in the gogo dot-com peak, one person wasn't going to single-handedly setup an entire carrier network or even a major branch office. Too much equipment, too much deadline, too many places to be at the same time, too much monkey work for someone making that kind of salary.
Combine it with Win10 telemetry and you have a huge datamining business with a really strong grip on a huge swath of the developed world's business data.
I'd actually be kind of surprised if at some point there wasn't a national security conversation on the risks of this much power and information in the hands of one company.
And no American born children of foreign immigrants ever experience any cultural traditions -- good, bad or otherwise -- of their home country. They don't ever speak their parents' native language, eat their native foods, practice their native religions, celebrate any native festivals, wear native dress, or engage in any behavior that went on in their parents' home country.
I've read that homosexual relationships between Afghani men and boys are surprisingly common in Afghanistan, although forbidden and not entirely consensual.
Maybe this guy was in the category of less than consensual youth participant at some point and is having trouble with the cognitive dissonance of that experience.
Combine that with kind of a loser lifestyle and maybe the purifying mission of ISIS became appealing, offering an opportunity to get in on a little jihad, punish "those men" who made him perform homosexual sex acts, and purify his own tainted soul by demonstrating he's not one of them.
He chose gays to kill on purpose and it was a pretty deep and personal hostility. You can argue the strategic merits of a nightclub (limited egress, lots of people in a small space, etc) but dozens of places meet that criteria -- movies, malls, sporting events, and all of them filled with degenerate, gluttonous and heretical Westerners, all of them much higher value targets than Hispanic homosexuals.
He picked gays to kill because of his own psychological issues, ISIS propaganda was just a catalyst that set off the reaction.
What I really worry about now, though, is that every fringe nutjob with a personal axe to grind now using ISIS as an excuse to start killing people. I worry it will become a meme for lunatics that will take on a self-perpetuating dynamic.
Innovation in terms of intrinsic product improvement or creation seems to be be supplanted by innovation as business engineering. This type of innovation produces product changes which increase lock-in, adds tracking, coerces users into other platforms, furthers planed obsolescence, basically anything that changes the products to improve profit margins first, with improvements to users a distant second if at all.
I suspect that big companies like Facebook or Apple or the like will eventually cross some line, either individually or collectively and we will end up with some kind of regulations that slow this process or reverse it somewhat. There will be an argument that regulations will kill innovation, but we're already to the point where a lot of the so-called "innovation" isn't making things better, but is really just ways too wring more profit out of customers.
Ultimately I think so many of these companies just end up being so profitable and control so much of the market, they are a prisoner of their own success and risk aversion and rather than produce real innovation, they are forced by Wall Street thinking into ways to push the margin up ever further.
I don't know what the breakdown of Netflix viewership is by device type, but I wonder if an offline caching scheme isn't limited by the fact that so many devices used to access it have little or no caching capability anyway.
It'd be highly PC specific code and the resultant security arms race to prevent it from being ripped. I'd wager that there's probably a good enough encryption threshold that would stop 98% of people from doing it, though, which ought to be adequate.
You would have thought that on devices with more secure storage, like an iPad, that they would have considered enabling it.
Paper currency is worthless, we only pretend it has value. It wasn't until the last 100 years that currency wasn't tied to the market value of a precious metal, demand-convertible into precious metal or actually made out of precious metal.
It's debatable whether a Trek-like society would even use a typical currency. They would probably use a form of electronic currency that couldn't be replicated and if they had a physical currency, it would somehow be physical representation tied to some electronic account.
While such an economy would probably have little material scarcity, it's not like it would be completely free of scarcity. Dilithium, the energy source for the Trek universe seems to be a material associated with some kind of scarcity, which would imply that there is ultimately limits on energy production and consumption which would imply limits on the ability to use a replicator to produce goods bound by energy production and consumption.
There are also other scarcities to take into account, like habitable space, labor to construct items too large or complex to replicate, and so on. Maybe currency would end up being backed by a non-material construct, like habitable space or energy.
Gary Johnson is opposed to the TPP. He supports free trade in principle, but does not support the TPP.
I voted for Johnson last time around and I agree with a lot of libertarian ideas.
One thing I ponder, though, is if libertarianism is a lot like communism in some ways -- the idealized version of it is great, but due to the stupid nature of people you can't ever really have the idealized version of it, all you actually get is the crap version of it. Free trade is never going to be free trade, it's going to be a TPP version of free trade, for example.
And by mixing, I mean a Bluetooth receiver (headphones, etc) that could be paired with multiple devices at the same time. For example, having a single headset paired with a phone and a computer and no stupid tricks necessary to hear audio from either source simultaneously.
Obviously there would need to be some stupid tricks involved to adjust sound levels or something.
I've had headphone dongles that allowed multiple device pairings, but you have to manually switch between devices, or worse, disable bluetooth entirely on one device to get the secondary device to pair.
Doesn't the law generally exclude software from "fitness for a particular purpose" and "free from defects"?
It used to seem that these were exclusions that let them just sell buggy software with no consequences, I'd imagine they figure it allows them to insert spyware, too.
I weep for the idea we'll never get a comprehensive privacy law that makes this and all the other forms of commercial electronic surveillance without extremely explicit permission illegal. The major technology players are too invested in it, the FBI/NSA/etc snoops like to be able to acquire it via NSL and the fucking elected "representatives" are simply too bought and paid for to care about anything other than their political contributions.
It would seem like the best thing to do is to nuke the paper utilities by requiring anyone having utility status to be capable of demand generating some minimum threshold quantity of power, like 5 megawatt hours per day.
This would cut out all the non-producers simply looking to arbitrage the wholesale market, but be small enough that legitimate alternative producers could enter the market as well as self-producers (large backup generators or industrial plants with on-site power generation) still able to participate.
I kind of get the solar/wind power buyers who pay more. There are a smattering of people for whom paying extra for "renewable" power has some religious meaning even though the actual power they use may be from non-renewable sources. Fine. We salute your noble personal sacrifice for the cause of sustaining renewable energy.
What I completely don't get is why someone would be an *Apple" renewable power buyer. I see renewable as the basic "brand" here and don't understand why anyone would specify Apple power. Even device fandom doesn't explain it to me.
This looks mostly like a set of corporate constructs to lessen the regulatory burden and increase Apple's flexibility to both sell its excess power and maximize whatever financial advantages it has in terms of tax structure.
It seems to me like one of the weird side effects of massive profitability and lack of investment in product diversity or expansion is that some companies seem to be drifting into almost financial company status, where the business imperative shifts to structural tactics to expand profitability versus expanding the existing core business.
GE kind of did this a decade or so ago, where its finance unit became so important to the business that some people thought the company should be evaluated as a financial company not a manufacturer.
It just strikes me as an example of the mix of wealth inequality and the growing complexity enabled by technology.
If you ever tour old mansions, they really aren't as super huge as you might imagine and the level of technological complexity they have is minor -- maybe central heat or electricity, depending on when they were built. And a fair amount of the space are things devoted to extensive servant's quarters or functional areas obsoleted by modern technology. Even the kitchens seemed kind of primitive when you consider the size and complexity of the formal dinners they must have held.
And these were homes owned by the.05%ers of the time, not the kind of homes owned by the merely rich of today. While larger and perhaps slightly more sophisticated than the middle class homes of their era, they weren't as different as the same gap today.
Today's merely rich have much larger homes than demand many more intricate technology features, like zoned heating and cooling, sophisticated lighting controls, security systems, camera systems, giant kitchens with complex appliances, and so on.
The only advantage I remember from college was the economic advantages some kids had.
It doesn't make more economically advantaged kids smarter, and many of them squander this advantage partying, but they also don't face the soul-sucking grind of a job or the soul-sucking money problems that come with it. And the job of course takes hours away, sometimes leaving you amotivated to study or flat-out with less hours to study.
None of this means it can be done, but it does make it harder. Harder still for those occasional emotional crises that arise in college -- a couple of bad grades, social problems, etc.
I think you're right that government involvement in this manner isn't the right approach, I also think that the steps that online vendors have taken have been kind of marginal.
I think that online retailers have a significant moral hazard when it comes to online reviews. Their motivation is really only to increase sales, not validate reviews. I'm pretty sure Amazon doesn't have a review filter for "verified only" or really much else in terms of sorting reviews by categories that might aid in filtering out false reviews. They want to filter fake reviews only to the extent that it harms sales -- ie, obvious fakes that undermine purchaser confidence, not high quality fakes that promote sales.
And IMHO, it's gotten harder to filter fake reviews and IIRC I've read somewhere that there are companies who will actually promote products based on bogus reviews, a standardizing process that will improve the quality of fake reviews making them harder to spot. Fewer reviews in broken English with unlikely praise that reads like bad poetry.
While government ID is probably the wrong way to approach this, I could possibly see where there's a consumer protection angle in here somewhere that might say that online sellers have to do more to guarantee that reviews represent legitimate purchasers and prevent fake reviews and let consumers filter reviews in such a way that lets them filter out unverified purchasers.
Retired judges seem to get hired all the time as "special masters" or other one-time positions they don't want to use regular sitting judges for. It almost seems to be like military officers, they may step down from the bench but they seem to retain their judge credentials somehow, just like officers may retire from the military but can be recalled if they haven't also resigned their commissions.
But if they have a subscription option--say, $5/year--that I can pay that just makes sure they stick around and make changes to the app, I'll pay that.
I might buy into this, but....
1) You must update the app significantly at least once during the subscription period. Not just fucking bug fixes.
2) No ads, spam, tracking or unnecessary permissions
3) A means of exporting any persistent data I create in the app
4) a contact email for the app that actually gets responses. I don't care if its the actual developer or some kind of customer service team. I've bought apps where the dev was responsive and I've bought them where their was no support or response when the app didn't work.
5) App subscriptions with prompts to renew them for each subscription period. I am totally uninterested in buying into hard to cancel subscription models.
I'm more than happy to spend money on decent apps, I am not happy to just move into a parasitic environment where every app is a perpetual subscription for nominal bug fixes only, full of tracking, with no means of moving out my data and no support. Fuck that.
It also seems like an equally significant contribution to an industrial revolution is the right mix of sociopolitical and economic conditions.
The Romans had impressive engineering abilities and you would have thought that steam power would have been a natural extension, but it never developed. Their general macroeconomy was grown through conquest and the political and social organization was in many ways built around the military forces that enabled it, not around private firms, hired labor and the other concepts necessary for the kind of industrial development that drives technological innovation.
They also had a large supply of slave labor, which meant that labor saving devices weren't as important or valuable, especially when you factor in that slaves are probably more useful than basic machines in many ways because they have human intelligence -- maybe more like an android workforce.
I've always found it kind of interesting to what-if history if the industrial revolution hadn't happened not because of scientific knowledge but because social and political conditions didn't favor the circumstances of industrial development in a market economy. We might still be living in 19th century conditions without the benefit of the technological advancement provided by widespread industrialization.
Aren't we pretty much there now, without the need to declare anything?
Between 1989 and 2008, two families have controlled the White House. One of those families was a senior member of the administration of the only other family to control the White House. If Hillary wins a second term, two families will have controlled the White House for 28 of 35 years.
If you worked the historical numbers, that's probably more stable rule than a lot of actual monarchies.
It was actually more interesting when it was random narcissistic comments about the minutiae of people's lives.
Facebook made it too easy to share and reshare clickbait and ideological crap. People stopped being even remotely clever and turned it into a recycle bin of garbage data.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just reading a book on the Vikings this afternoon and happened to read the chapters on the settlement of Iceland and Greenland and thinking about space exploration.
Compared to even Norway, Iceland was a lot like Mars. Totally hostile climate, vast stretches of it totally unsuitable for human habitation. Extremely long voyage to get there in an environment -- the North Sea -- that's sure death if anything goes wrong.
Many died trying anyway, and not just all at once. It took several attempts by people who knew that previous ones had failed, fatally, to establish permanent settlements. And the ones that did fail failed for the same reasons Mars is risky -- we bring the wrong stuff and not enough of the right stuff, the climate is hostile, it's far away so you can't easily go back, and sometimes your fellow colonists turn on you and you slaughter each other *and then* die of starvation.
In many ways, at least as far as we know, the one thing we don't have to worry about on Mars is having to fight our way through hostile natives. Not only did previous migrants face long voyages to uncertain destinations, there was also the likelihood they would have to go to war with whoever they ran into -- hey, let's embark on a trip that's likely fatal simply in the conveyance we have available, to a place we might not have the knowledge or stuff to survive in, and let's do it to steal stuff from people who will fight us to the death to stop us.
Yet humans have been doing it for millennia, despite the risks and the repeated failures. It's part of what makes us human. If that wasn't part of our humanity, we'd still be eating mangoes and dipping sticks into anthills on the edge of the forest and the savanna.
I was mainly stringing together an argument for the sake of conspiracy theorizing, not establishing any kind of concrete theory that would actually explain anything.
But why can't this be just as much about Islam as anti-gay? The widespread hostility towards homosexuals in the Islamic religion and every major Islamic nation in the world isn't exactly a secret. It's not like a Muslim child of Afghani immigrants solely obtained his ideas about gays watching Fox News and the 700 Club.
(Hang on a second, while I put on my tinfoil hat...)
This is pretty conspiratorial and therefore wrong, but it's Slashdot, so I'll continue.
I'd argue that the liberal media wants to accomplish a couple of things.
One, it's an anti-gay hate crime. This allows for a gay victimhood narrative, which also allows a broad brush to paint anti-gay Christians as being partly responsible for it by promoting an anti-gay narrative (gay marriages, the bathroom thing, etc). And in this country, any incident that makes your group a victim enhances your group's political standing as deserving of special protection.
By making it an anti-gay crime, they can focus on the hate crime angle and talk around the Islamic terrorism part. Now, this guy sounds unhinged and he might also have pledged allegiance to Emperor Palpatine, SPECTRE and the Big Bad Wolf, too, so the actual ISIS part probably isn't all that significant.
But by focusing on the hate crime aspect, the mental illness part, and everything else, they can avoid talking about anything to do with Islam as a religion/theology/philosophy which encourages violence and terrorism. Downplaying Islam as a force of violence is a very high priority in the Diversity(tm) business.
And ignoring the Islamic terror part of the equation and making it "just another hate crime" also allows the narrative of gun control to be introduced -- because of course, it wasn't a planned act of terror committed by someone embracing a terror agenda. *Those* people could plant bombs, run hijacked planes into skyscrapers or numerous other non-gun acts of violence. We can't stop committed terrorists, but if we had gun ban^H^H^Hcontrol we could stop these hate-filled lunatics.
Anyway, that's my conspiratorial angle on it. I don't know how much I actually take seriously, but it's obviously going to be used first to promote gun control, then go after anyone with a non-conforming opinion on gay rights, and with enough discounting, used to go after anyone who suggests that maybe the Islamic terror thing has anything to do with it.
I almost believe the organization chart bit, but the "some people" was probably a handful of people at most and how much equipment could a single person be allowed to check out at once? A router and a switch? I doubt you're backing up a moving van to the loading dock to get one of everything.
Everything I've always heard about the CCIE certification, though, sounds like winning the lottery. I had a Cisco instructor tell us it was REALLY hard exam-wise, and the practicum was a two-day on-site affair at your own expense.
Day one was a really complex setup of multiple devices and protocols with "but that won't work" dependencies that actually could be made to work and if it didn't work just right, you were done and had to go home.
Day two was trying to fix that same setup they broke while you were gone in very subtle ways under a time deadline and knowing how it was broken.
The instructor I had said that if you passed, a recruiter from Cisco was next in line after the person who handed you your certification.
My instructor said he knew a guy (don't they all?) who had a CCIE and worked as an independent contractor making six figures for about six months of work a year.
It's probably all grossly exaggerated, of course, but it's still a complex and difficult certification that demonstrates an extremely deep networking understanding. The problem is despite that level of knowledge, how valuable is a single person? Even in the gogo dot-com peak, one person wasn't going to single-handedly setup an entire carrier network or even a major branch office. Too much equipment, too much deadline, too many places to be at the same time, too much monkey work for someone making that kind of salary.
Combine it with Win10 telemetry and you have a huge datamining business with a really strong grip on a huge swath of the developed world's business data.
I'd actually be kind of surprised if at some point there wasn't a national security conversation on the risks of this much power and information in the hands of one company.
And no American born children of foreign immigrants ever experience any cultural traditions -- good, bad or otherwise -- of their home country. They don't ever speak their parents' native language, eat their native foods, practice their native religions, celebrate any native festivals, wear native dress, or engage in any behavior that went on in their parents' home country.
I've read that homosexual relationships between Afghani men and boys are surprisingly common in Afghanistan, although forbidden and not entirely consensual.
Maybe this guy was in the category of less than consensual youth participant at some point and is having trouble with the cognitive dissonance of that experience.
Combine that with kind of a loser lifestyle and maybe the purifying mission of ISIS became appealing, offering an opportunity to get in on a little jihad, punish "those men" who made him perform homosexual sex acts, and purify his own tainted soul by demonstrating he's not one of them.
He chose gays to kill on purpose and it was a pretty deep and personal hostility. You can argue the strategic merits of a nightclub (limited egress, lots of people in a small space, etc) but dozens of places meet that criteria -- movies, malls, sporting events, and all of them filled with degenerate, gluttonous and heretical Westerners, all of them much higher value targets than Hispanic homosexuals.
He picked gays to kill because of his own psychological issues, ISIS propaganda was just a catalyst that set off the reaction.
What I really worry about now, though, is that every fringe nutjob with a personal axe to grind now using ISIS as an excuse to start killing people. I worry it will become a meme for lunatics that will take on a self-perpetuating dynamic.
Something seems to have gone off the rails.
Innovation in terms of intrinsic product improvement or creation seems to be be supplanted by innovation as business engineering. This type of innovation produces product changes which increase lock-in, adds tracking, coerces users into other platforms, furthers planed obsolescence, basically anything that changes the products to improve profit margins first, with improvements to users a distant second if at all.
I suspect that big companies like Facebook or Apple or the like will eventually cross some line, either individually or collectively and we will end up with some kind of regulations that slow this process or reverse it somewhat. There will be an argument that regulations will kill innovation, but we're already to the point where a lot of the so-called "innovation" isn't making things better, but is really just ways too wring more profit out of customers.
Ultimately I think so many of these companies just end up being so profitable and control so much of the market, they are a prisoner of their own success and risk aversion and rather than produce real innovation, they are forced by Wall Street thinking into ways to push the margin up ever further.
I don't know what the breakdown of Netflix viewership is by device type, but I wonder if an offline caching scheme isn't limited by the fact that so many devices used to access it have little or no caching capability anyway.
It'd be highly PC specific code and the resultant security arms race to prevent it from being ripped. I'd wager that there's probably a good enough encryption threshold that would stop 98% of people from doing it, though, which ought to be adequate.
You would have thought that on devices with more secure storage, like an iPad, that they would have considered enabling it.
Paper currency is worthless, we only pretend it has value. It wasn't until the last 100 years that currency wasn't tied to the market value of a precious metal, demand-convertible into precious metal or actually made out of precious metal.
It's debatable whether a Trek-like society would even use a typical currency. They would probably use a form of electronic currency that couldn't be replicated and if they had a physical currency, it would somehow be physical representation tied to some electronic account.
While such an economy would probably have little material scarcity, it's not like it would be completely free of scarcity. Dilithium, the energy source for the Trek universe seems to be a material associated with some kind of scarcity, which would imply that there is ultimately limits on energy production and consumption which would imply limits on the ability to use a replicator to produce goods bound by energy production and consumption.
There are also other scarcities to take into account, like habitable space, labor to construct items too large or complex to replicate, and so on. Maybe currency would end up being backed by a non-material construct, like habitable space or energy.
Gary Johnson is opposed to the TPP. He supports free trade in principle, but does not support the TPP.
I voted for Johnson last time around and I agree with a lot of libertarian ideas.
One thing I ponder, though, is if libertarianism is a lot like communism in some ways -- the idealized version of it is great, but due to the stupid nature of people you can't ever really have the idealized version of it, all you actually get is the crap version of it. Free trade is never going to be free trade, it's going to be a TPP version of free trade, for example.
And by mixing, I mean a Bluetooth receiver (headphones, etc) that could be paired with multiple devices at the same time. For example, having a single headset paired with a phone and a computer and no stupid tricks necessary to hear audio from either source simultaneously.
Obviously there would need to be some stupid tricks involved to adjust sound levels or something.
I've had headphone dongles that allowed multiple device pairings, but you have to manually switch between devices, or worse, disable bluetooth entirely on one device to get the secondary device to pair.
Doesn't the law generally exclude software from "fitness for a particular purpose" and "free from defects"?
It used to seem that these were exclusions that let them just sell buggy software with no consequences, I'd imagine they figure it allows them to insert spyware, too.
I weep for the idea we'll never get a comprehensive privacy law that makes this and all the other forms of commercial electronic surveillance without extremely explicit permission illegal. The major technology players are too invested in it, the FBI/NSA/etc snoops like to be able to acquire it via NSL and the fucking elected "representatives" are simply too bought and paid for to care about anything other than their political contributions.
It would seem like the best thing to do is to nuke the paper utilities by requiring anyone having utility status to be capable of demand generating some minimum threshold quantity of power, like 5 megawatt hours per day.
This would cut out all the non-producers simply looking to arbitrage the wholesale market, but be small enough that legitimate alternative producers could enter the market as well as self-producers (large backup generators or industrial plants with on-site power generation) still able to participate.
I kind of get the solar/wind power buyers who pay more. There are a smattering of people for whom paying extra for "renewable" power has some religious meaning even though the actual power they use may be from non-renewable sources. Fine. We salute your noble personal sacrifice for the cause of sustaining renewable energy.
What I completely don't get is why someone would be an *Apple" renewable power buyer. I see renewable as the basic "brand" here and don't understand why anyone would specify Apple power. Even device fandom doesn't explain it to me.
This looks mostly like a set of corporate constructs to lessen the regulatory burden and increase Apple's flexibility to both sell its excess power and maximize whatever financial advantages it has in terms of tax structure.
It seems to me like one of the weird side effects of massive profitability and lack of investment in product diversity or expansion is that some companies seem to be drifting into almost financial company status, where the business imperative shifts to structural tactics to expand profitability versus expanding the existing core business.
GE kind of did this a decade or so ago, where its finance unit became so important to the business that some people thought the company should be evaluated as a financial company not a manufacturer.
There's at least one pfsense appliance in the AWS image inventory from a third party vendor.
It just strikes me as an example of the mix of wealth inequality and the growing complexity enabled by technology.
If you ever tour old mansions, they really aren't as super huge as you might imagine and the level of technological complexity they have is minor -- maybe central heat or electricity, depending on when they were built. And a fair amount of the space are things devoted to extensive servant's quarters or functional areas obsoleted by modern technology. Even the kitchens seemed kind of primitive when you consider the size and complexity of the formal dinners they must have held.
And these were homes owned by the .05%ers of the time, not the kind of homes owned by the merely rich of today. While larger and perhaps slightly more sophisticated than the middle class homes of their era, they weren't as different as the same gap today.
Today's merely rich have much larger homes than demand many more intricate technology features, like zoned heating and cooling, sophisticated lighting controls, security systems, camera systems, giant kitchens with complex appliances, and so on.
The only advantage I remember from college was the economic advantages some kids had.
It doesn't make more economically advantaged kids smarter, and many of them squander this advantage partying, but they also don't face the soul-sucking grind of a job or the soul-sucking money problems that come with it. And the job of course takes hours away, sometimes leaving you amotivated to study or flat-out with less hours to study.
None of this means it can be done, but it does make it harder. Harder still for those occasional emotional crises that arise in college -- a couple of bad grades, social problems, etc.
If all of the countries other than the US were to agree to use the same fork,
You have boundless optimism in the level of agreement and cooperation of the entire world.
I think you're right that government involvement in this manner isn't the right approach, I also think that the steps that online vendors have taken have been kind of marginal.
I think that online retailers have a significant moral hazard when it comes to online reviews. Their motivation is really only to increase sales, not validate reviews. I'm pretty sure Amazon doesn't have a review filter for "verified only" or really much else in terms of sorting reviews by categories that might aid in filtering out false reviews. They want to filter fake reviews only to the extent that it harms sales -- ie, obvious fakes that undermine purchaser confidence, not high quality fakes that promote sales.
And IMHO, it's gotten harder to filter fake reviews and IIRC I've read somewhere that there are companies who will actually promote products based on bogus reviews, a standardizing process that will improve the quality of fake reviews making them harder to spot. Fewer reviews in broken English with unlikely praise that reads like bad poetry.
While government ID is probably the wrong way to approach this, I could possibly see where there's a consumer protection angle in here somewhere that might say that online sellers have to do more to guarantee that reviews represent legitimate purchasers and prevent fake reviews and let consumers filter reviews in such a way that lets them filter out unverified purchasers.
Retired judges seem to get hired all the time as "special masters" or other one-time positions they don't want to use regular sitting judges for. It almost seems to be like military officers, they may step down from the bench but they seem to retain their judge credentials somehow, just like officers may retire from the military but can be recalled if they haven't also resigned their commissions.
But if they have a subscription option--say, $5/year--that I can pay that just makes sure they stick around and make changes to the app, I'll pay that.
I might buy into this, but....
1) You must update the app significantly at least once during the subscription period. Not just fucking bug fixes.
2) No ads, spam, tracking or unnecessary permissions
3) A means of exporting any persistent data I create in the app
4) a contact email for the app that actually gets responses. I don't care if its the actual developer or some kind of customer service team. I've bought apps where the dev was responsive and I've bought them where their was no support or response when the app didn't work.
5) App subscriptions with prompts to renew them for each subscription period. I am totally uninterested in buying into hard to cancel subscription models.
I'm more than happy to spend money on decent apps, I am not happy to just move into a parasitic environment where every app is a perpetual subscription for nominal bug fixes only, full of tracking, with no means of moving out my data and no support. Fuck that.
It also seems like an equally significant contribution to an industrial revolution is the right mix of sociopolitical and economic conditions.
The Romans had impressive engineering abilities and you would have thought that steam power would have been a natural extension, but it never developed. Their general macroeconomy was grown through conquest and the political and social organization was in many ways built around the military forces that enabled it, not around private firms, hired labor and the other concepts necessary for the kind of industrial development that drives technological innovation.
They also had a large supply of slave labor, which meant that labor saving devices weren't as important or valuable, especially when you factor in that slaves are probably more useful than basic machines in many ways because they have human intelligence -- maybe more like an android workforce.
I've always found it kind of interesting to what-if history if the industrial revolution hadn't happened not because of scientific knowledge but because social and political conditions didn't favor the circumstances of industrial development in a market economy. We might still be living in 19th century conditions without the benefit of the technological advancement provided by widespread industrialization.
Aren't we pretty much there now, without the need to declare anything?
Between 1989 and 2008, two families have controlled the White House. One of those families was a senior member of the administration of the only other family to control the White House. If Hillary wins a second term, two families will have controlled the White House for 28 of 35 years.
If you worked the historical numbers, that's probably more stable rule than a lot of actual monarchies.
It was actually more interesting when it was random narcissistic comments about the minutiae of people's lives.
Facebook made it too easy to share and reshare clickbait and ideological crap. People stopped being even remotely clever and turned it into a recycle bin of garbage data.