And something else that takes exotic batteries to run.
You'd think you'd get a huge amount of the value out of a pair of fairly generic in-ear earplugs, which take no batteries and can get wet/lost/abused for little cost.
How about ads being forced to be static images or text only, with no fucking Javascript, flash or any other programmatic content? The ads are less annoying and the opportunity for useful malware payload gets closer to zero.
Since those kinds of ads won't go away completely, the sites or the advertisers themselves can create them which will greatly reduce the opportunity for anonymous content injection into ad networks.
Sure, it's less efficient for advertising, but its a hell of a lot safer. I hate to think that the reason ads are so insecure is so that the advertising industry is more efficient. It's like their single digit percentage increase in profit is being paid for by huge security costs everywhere.
On a par with a drugs policy that says "the goverment should just buy all the drugs at street prices" Pathetic.
I've read more than once that in the mid 1970s several warlords in the Golden Triangle offered to sell the US government their entire opium production.
And I think it's been suggested as a counter-insurgency tactic in Afghanistan. Rather than spending even more to convince local farmers to grow lower-value cash crops and an eradication by force campaign, simply corner the market and buy up the supply.
I'm sure there are problems, both in terms of academic economics and unintended consequences, but it's an interesting idea. And I think that it's never been tried tells me something about the other motivations of drugs policy that have nothing to do with inhibiting drug use.
(Don't get me wrong, I think that prohibitionist drugs policy is broken and nonworkable, but cornering the market on supply is an intriguing idea that's dismissed too easily.)
The "too much traffic" complaint has been echoing in my neighborhood (not my immediate street, but the larger named "neighborhood").
It was never an issue until the city rebuilt a major arterial street with all kinds of "traffic calming" features, like curb extensions that prevent people from queuing for right turns in the "right"/parking lane, reducing the flow capacity of intersections by making right turns wait for through traffic at red lights and at many intersections, for left turning traffic as well.
They've also stripped a couple of large (3 lane) one-way streets with timed lights of an entire lane and converted it into a protected bike lane. This reduces capacity year-round even though with our harsh winters, only the most dedicated cyclists would bike November-March.
IMHO, the anti-car biases of the urban planners have created a lot of the local situation with their new "features", making the arterial roads so frustrating that people naturally seek alternatives. Traffic is like water -- you can reduce its flow in one place, but it will just flow elsewhere.
And I've been a longtime fan of the "back route" even before Waze (which I don't use). I've lived in the same city my whole life, so I have the advantage of decades of experience, but I do sometimes just put where I want to go as a destination and then just dive in to what I'm fairly sure will be a side route and then just ignore the directions until I actually need them, at which point it will route me through the side streets effectively.
I don't think there is a fix for the side road phenomenon other than making arterial streets have more traffic flow. Even though I live in the largest city in the state, the residential neighborhoods are heavily car dependent. They're too vast for effective walking anywhere -- shops and services can be a couple of miles, which is OK in good summer weather, but totally impractical for groceries or in any inclement weather.
About the only "fix" that would really help -- at least keep the locals out of their cars -- is a major overhaul of the zoning system to allow small shops and restaurants immediately in residential neighborhoods, but this would face huge opposition from immediate neighbors (although who wouldn't want a 25 seat pub a block and a half away) and probably economically non-viable due to regulations and low business volume.
Or even better, let each side submit a financial statement and their notion of the maximum they're able to afford. The lowest of those two numbers is then the most they're allowed to spend without a judge approving any overages.
It might be kind of crazy, but something tells me that generally speaking justice would be served by less money spent on cases. It usually seems like when there's a big imbalance in money, the richer party manages to bury the poorer one usually to the determent of justice.
The rate at which your house warms and cools, especially as a function of outside temperature, is a much better algorithm for controlling a heating and cooling system.
Is outside temperature even that important? All houses have varying levels of sun exposure which can pretty meaningfully influence the inside temperature of your house. I've noticed on sunny winter days that the house takes longer to cool off when a setback program is active. It also wouldn't surprise me if windy winter days caused the house to cool down faster as well.
Wouldn't the basic algorithm which programmable thermostats use -- how long did it take to get to the set point the last N times -- mostly good enough? Especially since weather seems to have patterns to it, so if it took a certain number of minutes over the last couple of days to heat back to the set point from the setback temperature the odds are usually pretty good that today will be a lot like yesterday.
Overall I find the Nest really hard to justify vs. a Honeywell 7 day programmable thermostat.
Accounting rules are crazy. Whenever I have something explained to me by an accounting, I'm often baffled at how it works.
The most recent example was a customer who sold prepaid punch cards to their members for an activity. The member bought a punch card for $100, good for 10 activities which normally would have sold for $12.
Strangely (to me anyway), even though the organization got all $100 at once from their member when a card was bought, they only accrued income when a punch was used.
My customer didn't have time to teach me accounting 101 and I sort of get the short version that was explained to me, it still seems kind of bizarre that you actually *gain* $100 but don't actually count it except $10 at a time over time.
In their case, it seems extra weird because the punch cards never expired and so there's the risk they would be never redeemed. I didn't get the explanation as to how that part is accounted for. I mean, if they took in $10,000 for punch cards but members only redeemed $5,000, it seems weird that you would carry $5,000 in liabilities essentially forever yet still have the $5,000 in cash already in some other accounting-speak category.
I'd be more worried about an overgrown ERP system from hell
I think this is the kind of AI we will end up having while people still run around saying we don't have AI because I can't discuss Shakespeare with my toaster.
The ERP/trading platforms at major banks are already capable of a ton of autonomy, self aware to the extent that I'm sure there are entire subsystems devoted to analyzing the known holdings of their competitors and anything remotely resembling a major stakeholder in any market, and so on.
They're even kind of a hive mind given the feedback loop that is present in the form of knowing what the market is doing and how it and other systems like it react.
It's not HAL9000 AI, but can you image even for a second how you would run a major investment bank with humans making 100% of decisions from greenbar reports that ran as overnight batch jobs? While I'm sure existing systems are still highly reliant on quants who define operational parameters and decide what kinds of analyses to perform, I'm sure the systems are also intelligent enough to suggest trends based on metadata and so forth.
They don't have any official investigatory powers, but what they do have is a level of organizational competency and probably some level of lobbying influence (like, they can actually get a meeting with a congressional aide who isn't a summer intern).
They also might have the time and staff to setup some kind of coherent and competent testing to build an understanding of the when and hows of Windows 10 auto upgrading.
Right now my sense is we have a chorus of people complaining about a lot of contradictory behaviors with Windows 10 upgrades. In this forum alone I've read what sound like competent people (ie, they type in complete sentences with basic grammatical correctness) describing totally contradictory outcomes.
It would be nice if an organization like the EFF actually ran a dozen or however many was necessary Win 7 desktops to see what's involved in getting to a nearly forced upgrade, and did it in a way that mimicked the scientific process enough to seem fairly conclusive.
At this point I don't know what I believe other than my own personal experience that says setting the GWX registry keys works so far. I haven't seen a system with them set (via group policy or locally) that has upgraded to Win 10.
That being said, I completely believe Microsoft is willing to force Win 10 by hook or by crook. It also wouldn't surprise me if their upgrade system had varying levels of aggressiveness based on criteria we don't understand, with the idea that by creating confusion as to potential outcomes that they can get away with a level of aggressiveness because people who haven't yet been targeted for it will write off those who have as incompetent or crackpots.
If its just "new petrol and diesel car sales" does that mean they will ban used car sales? Used car imports? This seems like one of those loopholes that could possibly be widely exploited if it was allowed.
The other thing I would wonder about is what the math is on electric consumption. Do they have a major electricity surplus or will they have to think about increasing electric rates or build new power generation facilities to handle the increased load?
There are an awful lot of amateur images out there of girls that very likely could be under 18, which is technically child porn although not of the elementary school age child porn variety.
I don't know how you would block for it, because the age is entirely ambiguous.
If it is mostly DSL, might the quote be translated to:
"We deliver service over an inherently bandwidth limited transport technology. We don't need caps because our delivery technology is too slow for anyone to reach them anyway."
Argentina could have basically been further developed than most European countries by now if they would have had saner politics.
I can't even say I really grasp the political divisions there -- it doesn't even seem to follow the basic left-right axis, it's like its following some z-axis of its own making.
My economics question is why back catalog movies which have been released on disc can't be purchased as downloads. I mean, the movie has already been telecined to a data format and often the DVD press runs for back catalog titles are small and the movie can sometimes become unobtainable at all except as a bootleg.
Which raises the question as to why studios make it so expensive for Netflix or the like streaming companies to gain access to back catalog titles. I'm guessing these titles aren't exactly burning up the sales charts and that a budget licensing deal for streaming on back catalog title to a streaming provider would be revenue they mostly wouldn't expect to get from a DVD. There's a ton of back catalog titles I'd watch on via streaming if they showed up on Netflix but only about once a year do I get the bug to buy a disc, and even then it's often a case where you can't even buy it because the tiny press run is sold out.
I would want to setup messenger with a message that replies 'I don't use messenger, so i am not going to get your message. please contact me some other way.'
One would think with a simulation our size running for this long would have produced more than a few noticeable bugs,
Umm, glitch in the matrix?
Maybe the noticeable bugs are things that normally get ascribed to discreditable phenomenona. Maybe they do get noticed, but since they represent bugs, we're generally able to disprove them because like computer bugs there's a whole series of preconditions for the bug to expose itself, preconditions that represent extreme corner cases rarely experienced.
So rather than a shared understanding of an apparently flawed simulation, we end up with people who have experienced the flaws but wind up discredited or considered less than sane.
I think the kind of criticism he's talking about isn't what I'd broadly call constructive engagement.
"Blacks engage in a lot of crime."
Constructive engagement criticism is "Blacks are subject to unfair treatment by the police."
What Carlson likely meant was responses that were like: "You're a horrible racist espousing white privilege and you should be prosecuted for hate speech."
The former responds to the statement they disagree with, but does it in a non-hyperbolic and respectful way. The latter vomits hyperbole and name-calling.
Obviously there's a lot of judgement involved, but I think Tucker has a point in that we're in this kind of social media mob justice mode of "criticism" and quite often "criticism" which is designed to deflect fact based statements that damage the "critic's" political agenda.
I think it depends on what snapshot of history you examine.
Rome probably had an excess of plebs -- with a slave economy, the plebs were just cannon fodder and until the Marian reforms they weren't even useful for that, and even post-Marian reforms they probably had a surplus of plebs even for that purpose.
I'm sure I've read that the post-plague era in Europe actually saw general wage increases due to population losses, so it might be argued then that the aristocracy was more invested in peasants than usual.
But I think overall the peasantry was no more necessary than they are now. Automation may eliminate a lot of jobs, but that only highlights the excess surplus of peasantry
Free clean energy might also allow us to do more resource recovery. A lot of recycling is energy bound -- collection and processing of resources into reusable elements faces an energy ceiling where recycling what we've already extracted is more expensive than extracting new.
If energy weren't an issue, you'd think that we'd have made all the first generation plastics we'd ever need, and new plastics would just be created from depolymerizing existing plastics down and creating new. But oil is cheap enough that we mostly just landfill or burn existing plastics and make new.
Or it could be that 2 parallel societies will coexist, the post-scarcity utopia and a low-tech mass population fighting for survival and trying to enter the utopia.
Isn't this, historically, what we've more or less always had?
An aristocracy which controls most of the resources, and vast peasantry largely living on whatever's left over, and what's left over is usually the crumbs whose marginal value to the aristocracy is so low they can't be bothered to monopolize that?
And usually there's just enough fear and cunning in the aristocracy that they grudgingly disgorge resources to keep the peasantry from rising against them -- usually known as bread and circuses -- or being useful as a tool to palace rivals in the aristocracy?
The current American political situation seems to be at the juncture where the aristocracy has misjudged the level of bread and circuses necessary to keep the peasantry in line, and they face some level of palace rivalry in the form of Trump and Sanders who find the peasantry's grumblings a useful tool for aspiring to power.
It's kind of re-run of the conflicts of the late Roman Republic. Sanders stands in for the Gracchi and their advocacy of the Plebs, Trump representing something of the advocate for the New Men, and Hillary a Sulla-like advocate for the established aristocracy.
I'm wondering at what point we'll have a phone that is a hypervisor or physical cluster under the hood, capable of delivering a virtual environment or separate physical environment for secure access.
All the insecure shit like Facebook or other dubious software applications could go in its own VM or on the "insecure" side, along with the baseband hardware. It'd be nice to be able to deploy multiple VMs for multiple VMs for various security levels.
This is a kind of disturbing development. I don't know what the actual hard costs to a manufacturer to give a device on-demand data access through a cellular type network, but my guess is that it's rapidly declining and that ultimately cellular network operators will be hungry enough for growth and have built out enough network capacity that selling capped data-only plans to IoT type companies will become appealing to them, especially if they can manage to get existing smartphone users to pay for them.
The scary part is that when you bring an IoT device home with magic connectivity, not only do you lose control of its communications but do you know what it might be doing to tap into your existing wireless network or somehow spy on you?
There's also the ability to build in obsolescence or subscription leverage -- when the device's data expires or no longer works, neither will it, regardless if its not worn out or otherwise damaged.
I suppose the good news is that if these devices exist, someone will figure out how to hack them to appropriate their data plans for their own use. This may be their undoing, as the devices may well be sold at a loss with the hope that subscription plans or other payments are designed to fund the connectivity that comes built in. They might try to ship them "deactivated" but there will probably be good reasons to ship them with functional data plans so they work out of the box without too much multi-vendor activation involved.
Slashdot Mirror
And something else that takes exotic batteries to run.
You'd think you'd get a huge amount of the value out of a pair of fairly generic in-ear earplugs, which take no batteries and can get wet/lost/abused for little cost.
How about ads being forced to be static images or text only, with no fucking Javascript, flash or any other programmatic content? The ads are less annoying and the opportunity for useful malware payload gets closer to zero.
Since those kinds of ads won't go away completely, the sites or the advertisers themselves can create them which will greatly reduce the opportunity for anonymous content injection into ad networks.
Sure, it's less efficient for advertising, but its a hell of a lot safer. I hate to think that the reason ads are so insecure is so that the advertising industry is more efficient. It's like their single digit percentage increase in profit is being paid for by huge security costs everywhere.
On a par with a drugs policy that says "the goverment should just buy all the drugs at street prices" Pathetic.
I've read more than once that in the mid 1970s several warlords in the Golden Triangle offered to sell the US government their entire opium production.
And I think it's been suggested as a counter-insurgency tactic in Afghanistan. Rather than spending even more to convince local farmers to grow lower-value cash crops and an eradication by force campaign, simply corner the market and buy up the supply.
I'm sure there are problems, both in terms of academic economics and unintended consequences, but it's an interesting idea. And I think that it's never been tried tells me something about the other motivations of drugs policy that have nothing to do with inhibiting drug use.
(Don't get me wrong, I think that prohibitionist drugs policy is broken and nonworkable, but cornering the market on supply is an intriguing idea that's dismissed too easily.)
The "too much traffic" complaint has been echoing in my neighborhood (not my immediate street, but the larger named "neighborhood").
It was never an issue until the city rebuilt a major arterial street with all kinds of "traffic calming" features, like curb extensions that prevent people from queuing for right turns in the "right"/parking lane, reducing the flow capacity of intersections by making right turns wait for through traffic at red lights and at many intersections, for left turning traffic as well.
They've also stripped a couple of large (3 lane) one-way streets with timed lights of an entire lane and converted it into a protected bike lane. This reduces capacity year-round even though with our harsh winters, only the most dedicated cyclists would bike November-March.
IMHO, the anti-car biases of the urban planners have created a lot of the local situation with their new "features", making the arterial roads so frustrating that people naturally seek alternatives. Traffic is like water -- you can reduce its flow in one place, but it will just flow elsewhere.
And I've been a longtime fan of the "back route" even before Waze (which I don't use). I've lived in the same city my whole life, so I have the advantage of decades of experience, but I do sometimes just put where I want to go as a destination and then just dive in to what I'm fairly sure will be a side route and then just ignore the directions until I actually need them, at which point it will route me through the side streets effectively.
I don't think there is a fix for the side road phenomenon other than making arterial streets have more traffic flow. Even though I live in the largest city in the state, the residential neighborhoods are heavily car dependent. They're too vast for effective walking anywhere -- shops and services can be a couple of miles, which is OK in good summer weather, but totally impractical for groceries or in any inclement weather.
About the only "fix" that would really help -- at least keep the locals out of their cars -- is a major overhaul of the zoning system to allow small shops and restaurants immediately in residential neighborhoods, but this would face huge opposition from immediate neighbors (although who wouldn't want a 25 seat pub a block and a half away) and probably economically non-viable due to regulations and low business volume.
Or even better, let each side submit a financial statement and their notion of the maximum they're able to afford. The lowest of those two numbers is then the most they're allowed to spend without a judge approving any overages.
It might be kind of crazy, but something tells me that generally speaking justice would be served by less money spent on cases. It usually seems like when there's a big imbalance in money, the richer party manages to bury the poorer one usually to the determent of justice.
The rate at which your house warms and cools, especially as a function of outside temperature, is a much better algorithm for controlling a heating and cooling system.
Is outside temperature even that important? All houses have varying levels of sun exposure which can pretty meaningfully influence the inside temperature of your house. I've noticed on sunny winter days that the house takes longer to cool off when a setback program is active. It also wouldn't surprise me if windy winter days caused the house to cool down faster as well.
Wouldn't the basic algorithm which programmable thermostats use -- how long did it take to get to the set point the last N times -- mostly good enough? Especially since weather seems to have patterns to it, so if it took a certain number of minutes over the last couple of days to heat back to the set point from the setback temperature the odds are usually pretty good that today will be a lot like yesterday.
Overall I find the Nest really hard to justify vs. a Honeywell 7 day programmable thermostat.
Accounting rules are crazy. Whenever I have something explained to me by an accounting, I'm often baffled at how it works.
The most recent example was a customer who sold prepaid punch cards to their members for an activity. The member bought a punch card for $100, good for 10 activities which normally would have sold for $12.
Strangely (to me anyway), even though the organization got all $100 at once from their member when a card was bought, they only accrued income when a punch was used.
My customer didn't have time to teach me accounting 101 and I sort of get the short version that was explained to me, it still seems kind of bizarre that you actually *gain* $100 but don't actually count it except $10 at a time over time.
In their case, it seems extra weird because the punch cards never expired and so there's the risk they would be never redeemed. I didn't get the explanation as to how that part is accounted for. I mean, if they took in $10,000 for punch cards but members only redeemed $5,000, it seems weird that you would carry $5,000 in liabilities essentially forever yet still have the $5,000 in cash already in some other accounting-speak category.
I'd be more worried about an overgrown ERP system from hell
I think this is the kind of AI we will end up having while people still run around saying we don't have AI because I can't discuss Shakespeare with my toaster.
The ERP/trading platforms at major banks are already capable of a ton of autonomy, self aware to the extent that I'm sure there are entire subsystems devoted to analyzing the known holdings of their competitors and anything remotely resembling a major stakeholder in any market, and so on.
They're even kind of a hive mind given the feedback loop that is present in the form of knowing what the market is doing and how it and other systems like it react.
It's not HAL9000 AI, but can you image even for a second how you would run a major investment bank with humans making 100% of decisions from greenbar reports that ran as overnight batch jobs? While I'm sure existing systems are still highly reliant on quants who define operational parameters and decide what kinds of analyses to perform, I'm sure the systems are also intelligent enough to suggest trends based on metadata and so forth.
They don't have any official investigatory powers, but what they do have is a level of organizational competency and probably some level of lobbying influence (like, they can actually get a meeting with a congressional aide who isn't a summer intern).
They also might have the time and staff to setup some kind of coherent and competent testing to build an understanding of the when and hows of Windows 10 auto upgrading.
Right now my sense is we have a chorus of people complaining about a lot of contradictory behaviors with Windows 10 upgrades. In this forum alone I've read what sound like competent people (ie, they type in complete sentences with basic grammatical correctness) describing totally contradictory outcomes.
It would be nice if an organization like the EFF actually ran a dozen or however many was necessary Win 7 desktops to see what's involved in getting to a nearly forced upgrade, and did it in a way that mimicked the scientific process enough to seem fairly conclusive.
At this point I don't know what I believe other than my own personal experience that says setting the GWX registry keys works so far. I haven't seen a system with them set (via group policy or locally) that has upgraded to Win 10.
That being said, I completely believe Microsoft is willing to force Win 10 by hook or by crook. It also wouldn't surprise me if their upgrade system had varying levels of aggressiveness based on criteria we don't understand, with the idea that by creating confusion as to potential outcomes that they can get away with a level of aggressiveness because people who haven't yet been targeted for it will write off those who have as incompetent or crackpots.
If its just "new petrol and diesel car sales" does that mean they will ban used car sales? Used car imports? This seems like one of those loopholes that could possibly be widely exploited if it was allowed.
The other thing I would wonder about is what the math is on electric consumption. Do they have a major electricity surplus or will they have to think about increasing electric rates or build new power generation facilities to handle the increased load?
There are an awful lot of amateur images out there of girls that very likely could be under 18, which is technically child porn although not of the elementary school age child porn variety.
I don't know how you would block for it, because the age is entirely ambiguous.
If it is mostly DSL, might the quote be translated to:
"We deliver service over an inherently bandwidth limited transport technology. We don't need caps because our delivery technology is too slow for anyone to reach them anyway."
Be brave. Get "DO NOT RESUSCITATE" tattooed on your chest.
Argentina could have basically been further developed than most European countries by now if they would have had saner politics.
I can't even say I really grasp the political divisions there -- it doesn't even seem to follow the basic left-right axis, it's like its following some z-axis of its own making.
My economics question is why back catalog movies which have been released on disc can't be purchased as downloads. I mean, the movie has already been telecined to a data format and often the DVD press runs for back catalog titles are small and the movie can sometimes become unobtainable at all except as a bootleg.
Which raises the question as to why studios make it so expensive for Netflix or the like streaming companies to gain access to back catalog titles. I'm guessing these titles aren't exactly burning up the sales charts and that a budget licensing deal for streaming on back catalog title to a streaming provider would be revenue they mostly wouldn't expect to get from a DVD. There's a ton of back catalog titles I'd watch on via streaming if they showed up on Netflix but only about once a year do I get the bug to buy a disc, and even then it's often a case where you can't even buy it because the tiny press run is sold out.
I would want to setup messenger with a message that replies 'I don't use messenger, so i am not going to get your message. please contact me some other way.'
One would think with a simulation our size running for this long would have produced more than a few noticeable bugs,
Umm, glitch in the matrix?
Maybe the noticeable bugs are things that normally get ascribed to discreditable phenomenona. Maybe they do get noticed, but since they represent bugs, we're generally able to disprove them because like computer bugs there's a whole series of preconditions for the bug to expose itself, preconditions that represent extreme corner cases rarely experienced.
So rather than a shared understanding of an apparently flawed simulation, we end up with people who have experienced the flaws but wind up discredited or considered less than sane.
I like how you can add "or code" to that line and it actually kind of rhymes.
I think the kind of criticism he's talking about isn't what I'd broadly call constructive engagement.
"Blacks engage in a lot of crime."
Constructive engagement criticism is "Blacks are subject to unfair treatment by the police."
What Carlson likely meant was responses that were like: "You're a horrible racist espousing white privilege and you should be prosecuted for hate speech."
The former responds to the statement they disagree with, but does it in a non-hyperbolic and respectful way. The latter vomits hyperbole and name-calling.
Obviously there's a lot of judgement involved, but I think Tucker has a point in that we're in this kind of social media mob justice mode of "criticism" and quite often "criticism" which is designed to deflect fact based statements that damage the "critic's" political agenda.
I think it depends on what snapshot of history you examine.
Rome probably had an excess of plebs -- with a slave economy, the plebs were just cannon fodder and until the Marian reforms they weren't even useful for that, and even post-Marian reforms they probably had a surplus of plebs even for that purpose.
I'm sure I've read that the post-plague era in Europe actually saw general wage increases due to population losses, so it might be argued then that the aristocracy was more invested in peasants than usual.
But I think overall the peasantry was no more necessary than they are now. Automation may eliminate a lot of jobs, but that only highlights the excess surplus of peasantry
Free clean energy might also allow us to do more resource recovery. A lot of recycling is energy bound -- collection and processing of resources into reusable elements faces an energy ceiling where recycling what we've already extracted is more expensive than extracting new.
If energy weren't an issue, you'd think that we'd have made all the first generation plastics we'd ever need, and new plastics would just be created from depolymerizing existing plastics down and creating new. But oil is cheap enough that we mostly just landfill or burn existing plastics and make new.
Or it could be that 2 parallel societies will coexist, the post-scarcity utopia and a low-tech mass population fighting for survival and trying to enter the utopia.
Isn't this, historically, what we've more or less always had?
An aristocracy which controls most of the resources, and vast peasantry largely living on whatever's left over, and what's left over is usually the crumbs whose marginal value to the aristocracy is so low they can't be bothered to monopolize that?
And usually there's just enough fear and cunning in the aristocracy that they grudgingly disgorge resources to keep the peasantry from rising against them -- usually known as bread and circuses -- or being useful as a tool to palace rivals in the aristocracy?
The current American political situation seems to be at the juncture where the aristocracy has misjudged the level of bread and circuses necessary to keep the peasantry in line, and they face some level of palace rivalry in the form of Trump and Sanders who find the peasantry's grumblings a useful tool for aspiring to power.
It's kind of re-run of the conflicts of the late Roman Republic. Sanders stands in for the Gracchi and their advocacy of the Plebs, Trump representing something of the advocate for the New Men, and Hillary a Sulla-like advocate for the established aristocracy.
I'm wondering at what point we'll have a phone that is a hypervisor or physical cluster under the hood, capable of delivering a virtual environment or separate physical environment for secure access.
All the insecure shit like Facebook or other dubious software applications could go in its own VM or on the "insecure" side, along with the baseband hardware. It'd be nice to be able to deploy multiple VMs for multiple VMs for various security levels.
I used to go to a lot of webinars, but since the office started refusing my mileage reimbursements for them I had to stop going.
This is a kind of disturbing development. I don't know what the actual hard costs to a manufacturer to give a device on-demand data access through a cellular type network, but my guess is that it's rapidly declining and that ultimately cellular network operators will be hungry enough for growth and have built out enough network capacity that selling capped data-only plans to IoT type companies will become appealing to them, especially if they can manage to get existing smartphone users to pay for them.
The scary part is that when you bring an IoT device home with magic connectivity, not only do you lose control of its communications but do you know what it might be doing to tap into your existing wireless network or somehow spy on you?
There's also the ability to build in obsolescence or subscription leverage -- when the device's data expires or no longer works, neither will it, regardless if its not worn out or otherwise damaged.
I suppose the good news is that if these devices exist, someone will figure out how to hack them to appropriate their data plans for their own use. This may be their undoing, as the devices may well be sold at a loss with the hope that subscription plans or other payments are designed to fund the connectivity that comes built in. They might try to ship them "deactivated" but there will probably be good reasons to ship them with functional data plans so they work out of the box without too much multi-vendor activation involved.