That's a great point, that there are still some Germans living with their past. But when the war ended, it was clear that Nazism was defeated then and there. Our legacy of slavery moved at a different pace. After the U.S. Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment simply abolished slavery. There were no other laws that suddenly gave the freed slaves any big pile of extra rights, privileges, protections, or reparations that didn't apply to others. Nothing told the rest of the population they had to be treated equally. And nothing punished the people who had treated them unjustly - the men in power did not give up their power. So the freed slaves had to make their own way in a country that was still very hostile towards them, and they fought for every step of progress.
A hundred years later, progress towards equality remained pitiful, so we still had to pass explicit anti-racism laws to deal with that legacy. One difference with those laws and the anti-Nazi laws is that they make illegal the act of racism only in certain practices, particularly those where people intersect with the government: hiring, schools, public transit, voting, etc. But nothing in the laws prevents hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan from existing, and they are still free to spew their ignorance, and even to run for office. Under our system, nobody's going to defend anything about them except their right to free speech.
And this is where the analogy is further strained by the big difference between the cases. In the case of slavery there was a group of people being treated unjustly by the laws, while in Germany there was a group of unjust people passing unjust laws. Trying to restore free speech isn't about trying to claim the Nazis were treated unfairly after the war they caused, it's trying to let the civilized people police themselves.
More to your point, I think a hundred years after the Civil War it was embarrassing how little progress the US had made towards equality. So I understand Germany's national desire to keep Nazism locked in a coffin, as people have proven themselves very very slow to change, even across generations. Perhaps in a hundred more years they'll be in a position to enjoy free speech.
We'll see. I think Germany is a lot more progressive in most ways than the U.S., but there are still restrictions we're really not used to.
And in 1950, the initial costs for those infrastructures was also a lot cheaper than today. New suburbs were advertising for people to come live there. And few politicians have ever won an election by promising to raise taxes in order to fix the sewers.
The way you phrase this, you're pointing out all the hindsight needed to stave off the problem, but that window closed 80 years ago. Now we have to figure out how to live with what we have.
There are plenty of neo-Nazis here in the good ol' US of A. The difference is that we have freedom of expression, where if a handful of skinheads goosesteps up and down the street yelling "Sieg heil!", there are a hundred non-skinheads who yell "go home you morons" at them.
The rest of us watch them on the TV, and either abhor, admire, or ignore the actions of one side or the other.
It's important that these idiots be allowed to express their stupid opinions. The basic idea is that it helps avoid creating the "poor suppressed martyrs" who use that to draw other people who feel outcast into their secret clubs.
Does this strategy work? Well, the neo-Nazis here are very marginalized.
This is the answer. Your identity never was, and still is not a secret. Only your authorization to draw money from your bank account needs to be reserved to you alone.
Chip and PIN does a good job of this. The card will readily give up your identity, but that's not a problem. It requires you to enter your PIN into that exact chip that provides the authorization to access your money, and that authorization is tied to one and only one transaction.
What it does not do is defend against the insider threat. The opposite end of the Chip and PIN cryptography needs to terminate in a Hardware Security Module that can't be tampered with, even by the bank employees.
Except data is "usage agnostic". The data might help Starbucks reorder enough coffee for tomorrow's purchase, and it might also go into a cancer research study, and an insurance company for actuarial purposes, etc., etc., etc. Once that data point exists, it's out of your hands.
Even then, I may not care if I knew my data was anonymized. As long as there's no relationship between "john" and "decaf", you can collect all the data on decaf you want. But I don't know it's anonymized, and I have no control over that data once it enters the cash register. The only thing I can control is to do some mini money laundering. I can choose to pay with cash if I think it's important.
And then I have to hope the retailer isn't using facial recognition.
Except for the part where education doesn't work with religious fundamentalists. "Thou shalt remain ignorant of anything not printed in this book" is a tenet of most religions, and is dogmatically followed by the fervent believers.
I'm not saying you should pass a law making religious people believe a thing or not believe a thing. I'm just saying you shouldn't have any laws at all regarding religion, especially those that promote respecting it, honoring it, denigrating it, or providing tax evasions for those that practice it.
Even if you don't care today, others are using data mining techniques to learn from those innocuous facts.
They know that coffee beans are decaffeinated using chemicals that cause cancer, and if they correlate that to an increased risk in cancer, they might increase your health insurance rates. And because people who drink decaf are statistically less alert and therefore more likely to get into car accidents than coffee drinkers, they're going to raise your car insurance rates, too.
Everybody has something to hide, even if the facts don't seem relevant to your well being today.
There are a ton of historical reasons American cities are built the way they are. First, because almost all of your cities were built long before the existence of cars, American cities were created after the existence of cars. What you don't seen to understand is all the empty space we had 100 years ago. By comparison, the rest of the world is incredibly crowded and land is extremely expensive. Because American land was cheap, and cars were cheap, and gas was cheap, it was easy to live an extra mile away from the city and buy an acre or hectare to give yourself room. Honestly, if it was easily affordable, would you choose to continue to live cheek-to-cheek with your next door neighbor, sharing a wall with him and his noisy children and his smelly cooking, or would you like a garden of your own?
As American cities grew, people found it very easy and affordable to move 10, 15, or 20 miles away from the city center, and do the same thing. (I know people now who commute 60 miles each way or more in order to live on 5 hectares of their own, or on a lakeshore.) Thus begat suburbs.
Of course, living 20 miles from the city means you don't want to drive 15 miles to the grocery store, so people built grocery stores out near the houses. But they're still a mile or five away from most people.
Because the suburban population density is so low compared to the rest of the world, infrastructure is much more expensive. Cities can't afford to run a bus down every suburban street, and the buses can't afford to go every market or shop. So bus stops are often a mile or more from many suburban residents, and they only take you to the main city, never to neighboring suburbs or even to local shops.
We were built on cheap gas, and now we have to make some serious urban changes to fix it. And those are very expensive.
What makes you think he has " intimate detailed knowledge of the internal workings of POS systems"? Sorry, that was a trick question. He doesn't care how POS systems work, or how sophisticated they may be. He only cares what credit card mag stripe data looks like. His malware scrapes the RAM of the process looking for the tell-tale patterns of mag stripe data, and grabs it. See http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA14-002A , which says "There are several types of POS malware in use, many of which use a memory scraping technique to locate specific card data. Dexter, for example, parses memory dumps of specific POS software related processes looking for Track 1 and Track 2 data. "
The track data just has to be in the RAM of the process, and this software finds it and logs it.
As you guessed, I was completely being not serious. I just had to sputter some stereotypical/.outrage.
And as far as utilities go, I have zero(!) complaints about mine. My electric company is a co-op, which is a fantastically reliable provider when compared to the giant utility on the north side of the river from me, and at a significantly lower rate. My natural gas provider has never given me cause for complaint, because it's always just worked 100% of the time, an important factor living here in the Frozen North. Even Comcast practically flies out of their trucks to service my house (one of the benefits of paying a premium price for their premium package is premium service.)
Forget fiction. I would like to know how dangerous the Mythbusters think the situation is.
Their tests on trying to create a manhole explosion was really interesting. They found they needed the right mix of air and methane, and a cluttered sewer pipe caused the fire to spread more effectively than a clear pipe.
For example, the 50% concentration mentioned in TFA is way too concentrated to produce a big boom.
You socialists think that just because corporate greed has always won every decision in every board room ever, that means that every future corporation will be equally corrupt. We'll be the first to tell you that "past performance is no guarantee of future success." It could certainly happen that a private, for-profit utility would put the public good ahead of their profits.
Consider the primary use of a remote is to operate a very limited set of functions while viewing the media: volume, pause, play, forward and reverse. If you were to count buttons you press, and how often you press them, those are the clear winners. The next level of functions is to select a piece of media: channel, movie, file, etc., or power on/off. You do these functions at a different time, when you are not actively watching the current media. The least used functions are setup and control types of activities, and you probably don't use those daily.
A touch screen excels at displaying the things you don't use all the time. There, a good interface can walk you through the stuff you're trying to do. It can group related controls, and put only the things you're likely to care about on the screen - maybe presenting sliders for adjusting colors, brightness, etc. A touch screen makes that easy.
A touch screen also excels for selecting media. As you noted, it can act as a second display, showing titles and other info. You can easily and quickly flip through your selections there, and you can see it without the awkward "10-foot-interface" of a typical on-screen-guide. And it can even display an on-screen keyboard for quick searching; entering a letter at a time on a 10-foot-interface is a lesson in stupid user interface design.
Where a touch screen is weakest is in the viewing functions. A good remote should allow you to do those few functions without drawing your eyes or your focus away from the media. But if you have to turn your attention away to see the volume slider, then drag on it, you're no longer focused on the show, and you've taken yourself away from the viewing experience.
Instead, for the viewing activities, it's best to have a tactile interface. Buttons that you can feel in the dark make it easy to do the tasks you need to do, and don't rip you out of the viewing experience. A touch screen is simply a bad choice there.
I had a Harmony 1100 remote that understood this really well. It was a hybrid, featuring a touch screen for dynamic controls, and had a dozen tactile buttons for the common viewing functions. It didn't do on-screen guides, though, and eventually I gave it up for a Google TV box with Bluetooth remote. While I still like the tactile buttons for viewing (apart from the bugs), it's been a serious downgrade for just about everything else. And running the Google TV remote via an iPad, iPhone, or computer interface doesn't help - as a matter of fact, it makes it much, much worse. I have to power on the screen, enter the unlock code, open the app, then navigate the app to find the remote screen and finally the volume button. It's a 10 second affair just to hit volume down, and by that time I've completely lost focus on the program.
The other thing missing in your calculations is the cost of risk during bulb replacement. Climbing a ladder to replace a high outdoor lamp comes at an elevated risk of injury or death due to falling from the ladder (1:8689 odds of dying from a ladder fall in a lifetime.) (The average cost of a fall from a ladder in 2004) was over $11,000.) For an incandescent bulb, the cost of that risk is 25 times that of an LED. And that's not counting the labor time, or amortizing the cost of the ladder itself.
Very few places in the US accept non-rechargeable batteries for recycling, and the population is much more spread out here, making things like that an inconvenient distance from most. Perhaps there are 7 places in the Minneapolis metropolitan area where I live that take them, and it's a 16,000 km^2 area of 3.4 million people.
Many major grocery stores and other locations accept rechargeable batteries, CFLs, and other specialty items for recycling, but regular non-mercury batteries are usually just tossed in the bin. I had a bucket of them and even my recycling center told me to throw them in the trash.
BTW, don't throw broken LED bulbs away, just hide them. The blister pack of one of those Cree bulbs cut its way through the flimsy Home Depot sack, and two fell to my concrete floor as I got out of my vehicle. Both bulbs cracked. The thin silicone coating on the bulb held one together, but the other fully separated from the base. I removed the jagged bits and put that lamp in my garage door opener, where it still works just fine.
And I agree, those Cree bulbs are amazing. I am done with CFLs, and once the last is out of my house, I will likely never need to buy another bulb again.
The only downside is some clowns have been placing poor data into the collection - trails which are way off, restrooms which are not along trails, etc.
You think that's bad? Think about conflicting factions arguing over border lines, or competing businesses trying to steal each others' business. It'll make Wikipedia vandalism seem like children on the playground.
There was a young man named Frisk Whose lovemaking was exceedingly brisk So fast was his action That the Lorentz Contraction Reduced his tool to a disk.
To be clear, all the Z-wave stuff interoperates just fine. It's only the human interfaces that are inconsistent. At anywhere from $10 to $100 per switch, you don't want to waste too much on a decision you'll later regret.
I've been running Z-wave and a Vera for a couple of years now, and it's a nice hacker-friendly open system. You can talk directly to it, avoiding those really expensive pay-per-month services.
One problem is that I've built my system over time, and sourced light switches from both GE/Jasco and Leviton. All Z-wave switches are built in the Decora momentary push-on/push-off flat panel form factor, because a mechanical toggle switch would present a confusing up-or-down? on-or-off? problem to the user. So I started out with the GE/Jasco switches, because they have a more friendly push-top-on / push-bottom-off rocker action, which I really liked, and Leviton switches are all push-bottom-to-toggle. Unfortunately, only Leviton makes specialty switches that can dim a transformer - GE/Jasco doesn't. So now I have a mix of both, and it's definitely awkward.
I use it for a couple different things, but the coolest is that I added an astronomical time module to Vera. We raise orchids, and some of them need a constantly varying diurnal cycle (longer days in the summer, shorter in winter) in order to bloom. I now have the grow lights come on at 6 AM, and they shut off either three hours after sunset, or midnight, whichever comes first. This gives a longer-than-natural day cycle, which I need because the artificial lights are not as strong as the sunlight they would naturally have. And it constantly varies throughout the year, which triggers spring blooms in several of the species.
I also have battery powered water and temperature alarms. If they detect leaking water on the floor, or temperatures out of my preset range, they screech an audible alert and signal me through Z-wave. Vera then sends a Prowl alert to my iPhone.
And it does. Apple enlisted their customers to help increase the accuracy of location services by having their iDevices recording the GPS coordinates of all wifi access points and cell towers, and the time you are visible to them. This data is uploaded to Apple so that it can be sent to any customer in the area to help them learn their location, too. All visibility to a specific transmitter is averaged to create an area of probable coverage of the cell, and a point that can be guessed if GPS coverage is weak..
When news of this first hit, I reinstalled iOS on my iPhone, then took a six hour drive into northern Minnesota (family reasons, not just to waste gas driving.) After returning home, I extracted the data from my iPhone's cell location and wifi location tables. It had populated them during my drive. I converted the data to KML, and was able to infer my route in Google Earth just by looking at the radio sources I had encountered on my way.
Apple calls this "location services", but they don't claim that the phone owner is the only one who can learn their location as a result of using them.
But it does not ever dial my phone outside of that, and never sends my location anywhere else.
At least, it doesn't tell you when it does...
Oh, please. It's running SYNC by Microsoft. On the odd occasions the software actually manages to connect to my iPhone and dial, I can hear the modem screeching through the speakers. It's about as subtle as a brick through the windshield.
Now, if it was the NSA hackers who wrote the app, I'd be a lot more convinced it would be stealthy. But Microsoft? I'm just happy when the nav system can actually find the street name.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a great point, that there are still some Germans living with their past. But when the war ended, it was clear that Nazism was defeated then and there. Our legacy of slavery moved at a different pace. After the U.S. Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment simply abolished slavery. There were no other laws that suddenly gave the freed slaves any big pile of extra rights, privileges, protections, or reparations that didn't apply to others. Nothing told the rest of the population they had to be treated equally. And nothing punished the people who had treated them unjustly - the men in power did not give up their power. So the freed slaves had to make their own way in a country that was still very hostile towards them, and they fought for every step of progress.
A hundred years later, progress towards equality remained pitiful, so we still had to pass explicit anti-racism laws to deal with that legacy. One difference with those laws and the anti-Nazi laws is that they make illegal the act of racism only in certain practices, particularly those where people intersect with the government: hiring, schools, public transit, voting, etc. But nothing in the laws prevents hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan from existing, and they are still free to spew their ignorance, and even to run for office. Under our system, nobody's going to defend anything about them except their right to free speech.
And this is where the analogy is further strained by the big difference between the cases. In the case of slavery there was a group of people being treated unjustly by the laws, while in Germany there was a group of unjust people passing unjust laws. Trying to restore free speech isn't about trying to claim the Nazis were treated unfairly after the war they caused, it's trying to let the civilized people police themselves.
More to your point, I think a hundred years after the Civil War it was embarrassing how little progress the US had made towards equality. So I understand Germany's national desire to keep Nazism locked in a coffin, as people have proven themselves very very slow to change, even across generations. Perhaps in a hundred more years they'll be in a position to enjoy free speech.
We'll see. I think Germany is a lot more progressive in most ways than the U.S., but there are still restrictions we're really not used to.
And in 1950, the initial costs for those infrastructures was also a lot cheaper than today. New suburbs were advertising for people to come live there. And few politicians have ever won an election by promising to raise taxes in order to fix the sewers.
The way you phrase this, you're pointing out all the hindsight needed to stave off the problem, but that window closed 80 years ago. Now we have to figure out how to live with what we have.
There are plenty of neo-Nazis here in the good ol' US of A. The difference is that we have freedom of expression, where if a handful of skinheads goosesteps up and down the street yelling "Sieg heil!", there are a hundred non-skinheads who yell "go home you morons" at them.
The rest of us watch them on the TV, and either abhor, admire, or ignore the actions of one side or the other.
It's important that these idiots be allowed to express their stupid opinions. The basic idea is that it helps avoid creating the "poor suppressed martyrs" who use that to draw other people who feel outcast into their secret clubs.
Does this strategy work? Well, the neo-Nazis here are very marginalized.
This is the answer. Your identity never was, and still is not a secret. Only your authorization to draw money from your bank account needs to be reserved to you alone.
Chip and PIN does a good job of this. The card will readily give up your identity, but that's not a problem. It requires you to enter your PIN into that exact chip that provides the authorization to access your money, and that authorization is tied to one and only one transaction.
What it does not do is defend against the insider threat. The opposite end of the Chip and PIN cryptography needs to terminate in a Hardware Security Module that can't be tampered with, even by the bank employees.
Except data is "usage agnostic". The data might help Starbucks reorder enough coffee for tomorrow's purchase, and it might also go into a cancer research study, and an insurance company for actuarial purposes, etc., etc., etc. Once that data point exists, it's out of your hands.
Even then, I may not care if I knew my data was anonymized. As long as there's no relationship between "john" and "decaf", you can collect all the data on decaf you want. But I don't know it's anonymized, and I have no control over that data once it enters the cash register. The only thing I can control is to do some mini money laundering. I can choose to pay with cash if I think it's important.
And then I have to hope the retailer isn't using facial recognition.
Except for the part where education doesn't work with religious fundamentalists. "Thou shalt remain ignorant of anything not printed in this book" is a tenet of most religions, and is dogmatically followed by the fervent believers.
I'm not saying you should pass a law making religious people believe a thing or not believe a thing. I'm just saying you shouldn't have any laws at all regarding religion, especially those that promote respecting it, honoring it, denigrating it, or providing tax evasions for those that practice it.
Even if you don't care today, others are using data mining techniques to learn from those innocuous facts.
They know that coffee beans are decaffeinated using chemicals that cause cancer, and if they correlate that to an increased risk in cancer, they might increase your health insurance rates. And because people who drink decaf are statistically less alert and therefore more likely to get into car accidents than coffee drinkers, they're going to raise your car insurance rates, too.
Everybody has something to hide, even if the facts don't seem relevant to your well being today.
There are a ton of historical reasons American cities are built the way they are. First, because almost all of your cities were built long before the existence of cars, American cities were created after the existence of cars. What you don't seen to understand is all the empty space we had 100 years ago. By comparison, the rest of the world is incredibly crowded and land is extremely expensive. Because American land was cheap, and cars were cheap, and gas was cheap, it was easy to live an extra mile away from the city and buy an acre or hectare to give yourself room. Honestly, if it was easily affordable, would you choose to continue to live cheek-to-cheek with your next door neighbor, sharing a wall with him and his noisy children and his smelly cooking, or would you like a garden of your own?
As American cities grew, people found it very easy and affordable to move 10, 15, or 20 miles away from the city center, and do the same thing. (I know people now who commute 60 miles each way or more in order to live on 5 hectares of their own, or on a lakeshore.) Thus begat suburbs.
Of course, living 20 miles from the city means you don't want to drive 15 miles to the grocery store, so people built grocery stores out near the houses. But they're still a mile or five away from most people.
Because the suburban population density is so low compared to the rest of the world, infrastructure is much more expensive. Cities can't afford to run a bus down every suburban street, and the buses can't afford to go every market or shop. So bus stops are often a mile or more from many suburban residents, and they only take you to the main city, never to neighboring suburbs or even to local shops.
We were built on cheap gas, and now we have to make some serious urban changes to fix it. And those are very expensive.
What makes you think he has " intimate detailed knowledge of the internal workings of POS systems"? Sorry, that was a trick question. He doesn't care how POS systems work, or how sophisticated they may be. He only cares what credit card mag stripe data looks like. His malware scrapes the RAM of the process looking for the tell-tale patterns of mag stripe data, and grabs it. See http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA14-002A , which says "There are several types of POS malware in use, many of which use a memory scraping technique to locate specific card data. Dexter, for example, parses memory dumps of specific POS software related processes looking for Track 1 and Track 2 data. "
The track data just has to be in the RAM of the process, and this software finds it and logs it.
As you guessed, I was completely being not serious. I just had to sputter some stereotypical /.outrage.
And as far as utilities go, I have zero(!) complaints about mine. My electric company is a co-op, which is a fantastically reliable provider when compared to the giant utility on the north side of the river from me, and at a significantly lower rate. My natural gas provider has never given me cause for complaint, because it's always just worked 100% of the time, an important factor living here in the Frozen North. Even Comcast practically flies out of their trucks to service my house (one of the benefits of paying a premium price for their premium package is premium service.)
They spent months selling them already. The guys who did this have already made out like bandits.
Perhaps they made out like bandits because they are bandits?
Forget fiction. I would like to know how dangerous the Mythbusters think the situation is.
Their tests on trying to create a manhole explosion was really interesting. They found they needed the right mix of air and methane, and a cluttered sewer pipe caused the fire to spread more effectively than a clear pipe.
For example, the 50% concentration mentioned in TFA is way too concentrated to produce a big boom.
Utilities should be public, and not operated for profit.
But ... free markets! Capitalism! Invisible hands! Civil liberties! Competition!
You socialists think that just because corporate greed has always won every decision in every board room ever, that means that every future corporation will be equally corrupt. We'll be the first to tell you that "past performance is no guarantee of future success." It could certainly happen that a private, for-profit utility would put the public good ahead of their profits.
Well, it could happen.
Consider the primary use of a remote is to operate a very limited set of functions while viewing the media: volume, pause, play, forward and reverse. If you were to count buttons you press, and how often you press them, those are the clear winners. The next level of functions is to select a piece of media: channel, movie, file, etc., or power on/off. You do these functions at a different time, when you are not actively watching the current media. The least used functions are setup and control types of activities, and you probably don't use those daily.
A touch screen excels at displaying the things you don't use all the time. There, a good interface can walk you through the stuff you're trying to do. It can group related controls, and put only the things you're likely to care about on the screen - maybe presenting sliders for adjusting colors, brightness, etc. A touch screen makes that easy.
A touch screen also excels for selecting media. As you noted, it can act as a second display, showing titles and other info. You can easily and quickly flip through your selections there, and you can see it without the awkward "10-foot-interface" of a typical on-screen-guide. And it can even display an on-screen keyboard for quick searching; entering a letter at a time on a 10-foot-interface is a lesson in stupid user interface design.
Where a touch screen is weakest is in the viewing functions. A good remote should allow you to do those few functions without drawing your eyes or your focus away from the media. But if you have to turn your attention away to see the volume slider, then drag on it, you're no longer focused on the show, and you've taken yourself away from the viewing experience.
Instead, for the viewing activities, it's best to have a tactile interface. Buttons that you can feel in the dark make it easy to do the tasks you need to do, and don't rip you out of the viewing experience. A touch screen is simply a bad choice there.
I had a Harmony 1100 remote that understood this really well. It was a hybrid, featuring a touch screen for dynamic controls, and had a dozen tactile buttons for the common viewing functions. It didn't do on-screen guides, though, and eventually I gave it up for a Google TV box with Bluetooth remote. While I still like the tactile buttons for viewing (apart from the bugs), it's been a serious downgrade for just about everything else. And running the Google TV remote via an iPad, iPhone, or computer interface doesn't help - as a matter of fact, it makes it much, much worse. I have to power on the screen, enter the unlock code, open the app, then navigate the app to find the remote screen and finally the volume button. It's a 10 second affair just to hit volume down, and by that time I've completely lost focus on the program.
Better. Alter the map so it's the only route, and give them a four-hour traffic jam.
Hey, if it's good enough for the governor, it's good enough for you.
The other thing missing in your calculations is the cost of risk during bulb replacement. Climbing a ladder to replace a high outdoor lamp comes at an elevated risk of injury or death due to falling from the ladder (1:8689 odds of dying from a ladder fall in a lifetime.) (The average cost of a fall from a ladder in 2004) was over $11,000.) For an incandescent bulb, the cost of that risk is 25 times that of an LED. And that's not counting the labor time, or amortizing the cost of the ladder itself.
(Actually, the mercury content is a pretty good reason to ban them.)
Very few places in the US accept non-rechargeable batteries for recycling, and the population is much more spread out here, making things like that an inconvenient distance from most. Perhaps there are 7 places in the Minneapolis metropolitan area where I live that take them, and it's a 16,000 km^2 area of 3.4 million people.
Many major grocery stores and other locations accept rechargeable batteries, CFLs, and other specialty items for recycling, but regular non-mercury batteries are usually just tossed in the bin. I had a bucket of them and even my recycling center told me to throw them in the trash.
BTW, don't throw broken LED bulbs away, just hide them. The blister pack of one of those Cree bulbs cut its way through the flimsy Home Depot sack, and two fell to my concrete floor as I got out of my vehicle. Both bulbs cracked. The thin silicone coating on the bulb held one together, but the other fully separated from the base. I removed the jagged bits and put that lamp in my garage door opener, where it still works just fine.
And I agree, those Cree bulbs are amazing. I am done with CFLs, and once the last is out of my house, I will likely never need to buy another bulb again.
The only downside is some clowns have been placing poor data into the collection - trails which are way off, restrooms which are not along trails, etc.
You think that's bad? Think about conflicting factions arguing over border lines, or competing businesses trying to steal each others' business. It'll make Wikipedia vandalism seem like children on the playground.
There was a young man named Frisk
Whose lovemaking was exceedingly brisk
So fast was his action
That the Lorentz Contraction
Reduced his tool to a disk.
Dirty enough for you?
To be clear, all the Z-wave stuff interoperates just fine. It's only the human interfaces that are inconsistent. At anywhere from $10 to $100 per switch, you don't want to waste too much on a decision you'll later regret.
I've been running Z-wave and a Vera for a couple of years now, and it's a nice hacker-friendly open system. You can talk directly to it, avoiding those really expensive pay-per-month services.
One problem is that I've built my system over time, and sourced light switches from both GE/Jasco and Leviton. All Z-wave switches are built in the Decora momentary push-on/push-off flat panel form factor, because a mechanical toggle switch would present a confusing up-or-down? on-or-off? problem to the user. So I started out with the GE/Jasco switches, because they have a more friendly push-top-on / push-bottom-off rocker action, which I really liked, and Leviton switches are all push-bottom-to-toggle. Unfortunately, only Leviton makes specialty switches that can dim a transformer - GE/Jasco doesn't. So now I have a mix of both, and it's definitely awkward.
I use it for a couple different things, but the coolest is that I added an astronomical time module to Vera. We raise orchids, and some of them need a constantly varying diurnal cycle (longer days in the summer, shorter in winter) in order to bloom. I now have the grow lights come on at 6 AM, and they shut off either three hours after sunset, or midnight, whichever comes first. This gives a longer-than-natural day cycle, which I need because the artificial lights are not as strong as the sunlight they would naturally have. And it constantly varies throughout the year, which triggers spring blooms in several of the species.
I also have battery powered water and temperature alarms. If they detect leaking water on the floor, or temperatures out of my preset range, they screech an audible alert and signal me through Z-wave. Vera then sends a Prowl alert to my iPhone.
And it does. Apple enlisted their customers to help increase the accuracy of location services by having their iDevices recording the GPS coordinates of all wifi access points and cell towers, and the time you are visible to them. This data is uploaded to Apple so that it can be sent to any customer in the area to help them learn their location, too. All visibility to a specific transmitter is averaged to create an area of probable coverage of the cell, and a point that can be guessed if GPS coverage is weak..
When news of this first hit, I reinstalled iOS on my iPhone, then took a six hour drive into northern Minnesota (family reasons, not just to waste gas driving.) After returning home, I extracted the data from my iPhone's cell location and wifi location tables. It had populated them during my drive. I converted the data to KML, and was able to infer my route in Google Earth just by looking at the radio sources I had encountered on my way.
Apple calls this "location services", but they don't claim that the phone owner is the only one who can learn their location as a result of using them.
But it does not ever dial my phone outside of that, and never sends my location anywhere else.
At least, it doesn't tell you when it does...
Oh, please. It's running SYNC by Microsoft. On the odd occasions the software actually manages to connect to my iPhone and dial, I can hear the modem screeching through the speakers. It's about as subtle as a brick through the windshield.
Now, if it was the NSA hackers who wrote the app, I'd be a lot more convinced it would be stealthy. But Microsoft? I'm just happy when the nav system can actually find the street name.