They work for a limited definition of work; that definition being they create more sales than they cost.
But that's the entire point. When the score is kept in money, the only thing that counts for those people is more money. If shouty ads get them more money, it works. Not "limited definition of work", but "I now have more money than I spent, therefore it completely worked."
There are major side effects to their advertising tactics: at least half of us think the sellers are unethical, we think their products are stupid and useless junk, the advertisers are prostitutes, and we think people who buy their products are gullible and stupid. The important thing to understand is that they don't care what we think. We are not their target audience, and never have been. Neither you nor I would ever buy a homeopathic "remedy", or a turnip twaddler, or a hairpiece organizer. But enough people do respond to these ads that they make millions of dollars off of them.
Think of them as polluters. Instead of spewing chemicals into a stream, they spew noise onto our televisions.
Discovery Channel had a short-lived series called "PitchMen" (Billy Mays, the star, died after filming the first season, and his backup basically sucked.) It was about a guy whose entire schtick was to market this stuff by shouting. While the products were mostly uninteresting junk, what was actually interesting was the information about the sales. Each day the commercials aired, the call centers took orders for tens of thousands of products. If he agreed to shout for your $20 piece of junk, you were almost guaranteed half a million dollars in sales. Every week it was another powerful demonstration that shouting "works", at least when your goal is to make money.
I always thought almighty god was zeroth level support. As in "You turn this sucker on and I'll pray to god that it works this time!"
From there, it's not good. You pick up the phone and descend to to the first circle of limbo, reserved for call center operators doomed to read from scripts. Next is the second level, where the phones are answered by system support groups, pummeled eternally by threats full of hot air to call their managers. The third level is a noisy, cold, icy machine room where system administrators are berated every time they take a call. The fourth level is where engineers are forced to joust with managers to keep their jobs while their phones ring endlessly. The fifth circle is where the VPs are tormented by joyless CEOs, members of the board, and majority stockholders in status meetings. The sixth circle is reserved for the salesmen who lied about their company's products, where they are surrounded by stacks of flaming four color glossy brochures touting features their systems never supported. The seventh circle is where the CFO sits in a rain of fiery charts of accounts and charges of embezzlement. The eighth circle of callbacks is where the company lawyer sits in a tarpit, where judges and prosecuters jab him with pitchforks full of product liability lawsuits. And the ninth circle is where the CEO is strangled and choked by a rack full of ethernet cables and fiber optic pipes, never understanding why none of them can ever hook up his iPhone to his PC no matter how hard he tries, and is bludgeoned by passing stockholders throwing dead batteries at him.
I saw a trouble ticket last year that had this line in it (I think it was after Sandy):
[date/time] Site router still down. Technician not en route, no ETA. Escalated to GiantTelCo 8th level support.
I don't care how stupid a manager is, at some point even the dumbest is going to recognize "8th level support" is bullshit. Then they finally might start asking "what are we paying for, exactly?"
Middle men know how to sell things to maximize the profits of the thing makers. It's been a valuable service to thing makers everywhere, even if you don't appreciate what they do or how they do it. Will the Internet make them obsolete? Probably not, because the thing makers still generally suck at marketing.
If the world had unlimited resources and money, and there was no competition for products, they'd be useless. But it doesn't, so they aren't. You don't have to like them or even believe they do any good, but they obviously can sell themselves to people who can't sell there own wares, so you'll be dealing with them for a long time to come.
I allow some content delivery sites, simply because a lot of sites are built that way. Akamai is a clever way to efficiently deliver cacheable media, like pictures, across the country quickly. And sites like Vimeo host their javascript stuff in a separate domain named vimeocdn. I find allowing a few selected exceptions delivers 95%+ of the web, and still effectively manages my perceived risk of javascript exploits.
The shouty ads that stupid people find memorable? Hate to disappoint you, but you see them because they work.
Half the people watching them may have a below average IQ. But the money they're willing to spend is perfectly legitimate, and can be collected by anyone with a low enough moral threshold. Even if you deliberately limit your advertising to only the stupid half of the populous, that's still a shitload of customers.
That's certainly not how the Smart Grid has to work.
One way it could work is for you to establish the rate you're willing to pay. A Smart Meter can tell your household appliances "The price of electricity from 4-8PM will follow this schedule: first 2 kWh are $0.20 each. Next 1 kWh is $0.40. Additional kWh are $5.00 each." You can then tell your A/C to "run for no more than 40 minutes per hour whenever the price > $2.00 / kWh", or "run the A/C for no more than $1.00 each hour." Demand pricing would allow you to decide for yourself "I don't want to pay these prices for extra A/C" or "I'm rich and want 70 degrees this afternoon, dammit." Scheduled pricing would allow people on very tight budgets a way to choose between their needs and their wants: TV and a fan, or small window A/C, but maybe not both.
Today I don't have the choice of "spend money and stay cool" or not. Instead, I have a system very much like the one described in the article you quoted. And I'm OK with it.
I had my electric co-op install a peak load controller on my A/C a decade ago. When the electric company sends their signal, the load controller shuts off my A/C for 20 minutes out of each hour. At least 10,000 other co-op members are part of the program as well, and together we have deferred the purchase of a new electric generator by over 10 years - and kept our overall electric rates low as well. My other benefit is that all the electricity my controlled A/C uses is sold to me through a separate meter at their cost: $0.055 / kWh, instead of $0.115 / kWh. My house might go up to a slightly uncomfortable 80 degrees when it's 100 degrees outside, but it knocks at least a hundred dollars off my bill a year. And the program is voluntary; I could call them and have them remove the controller, but then my bill would go back up.
Z-wave home automation devices use an out-of-band pairing step. You have to bring the controller and device to be controlled close together, then operate a manual switch on the controlled device to pair it to the controller. However, their security model appears to be almost entirely through patent-enforced obscurity, rather than any actual technical security. Z-wave door locks are supposed to be "encrypted", but nobody who knows is talking about how the protocols work, how the keys are stored and managed, or other details that would be good to know to evaluate their security.
It may seem frivolous, but there are lots of valid reasons. Most pertain to home automation in general, not just wireless systems, but most home automation systems today use wireless communication. Here are a few off the top of my head.
Wiring costs. Today, you run an extra wire from light fixtures to wall switches, regardless of where the fixture is in relationship to the switch. That may route a heavy copper wire down a short wall into the floor, across the floor to a wall, up the wall to the ceiling, and across the ceiling to the fixture. That's three pounds of copper plus 30 minutes of electrician time that didn't need to be spent. A wireless switch needs either cheap batteries or low current to operate the fixture, without the extra copper.
Energy savings. A smart house (wired or wireless) allows a system to turn off lights and appliances when not in use. While occupancy sensors are not totally reliable today, they can turn lights off from rooms that are not occupied. An unoccupied house could shut off all manner of appliances when the last person leaves. And unlike a kid who has to be reminded to shut off the lights, the system understands the rules 24x7.
Smart grid. The Smart Grid is a system where utilities will charge more for peak electricity in order to reduce demand. Today, on a hot day in August when the demand for A/C is the greatest, the utilities have to fire up "peak generators" which can cost 20 times as much for fuel as coal, hydro, or nuclear power. Assuming you are a rational consumer, you probably want to shut off extra lights and not run the dishwasher when electricity is so expensive. The Smart Grid will send a signal to your meter, saying "from 4-8 PM, charge $3.00/kWh, from 8-12PM charge $0.20/kWh". It will broadcast the electric rate to your appliances. You might configure your dishwasher to say "delay running until electricity is cheaper than $0.30/kWh".
Flexible control. You might only need lighting above a specific task area, but have a track fixture with a dozen lamps. Or you might rearrange the furniture so that a certain task would benefit from different lighting, but the fixtures are recessed and can't be moved. Wireless control lets you change the lighting to something appropriate for the task or room. I synced my low voltage outdoor fence lights to my deck lights with a simple scene change, so I can now walk the dogs after dark without having to leave the fence lights on.
Safety. While I don't think much of the "safety" arguments, there are some points that are important to some people. You can turn on all lights in a panic situation. You can turn off all appliances in case of a fire. Household sensors can detect water leaks, and smart valves can shut off the water supply in response. I do get an alert on my phone if there is a water leak in my basement, so there is certainly value to me.
Security. A wireless door controller and camera can let you allow in authorized service people when you're not home, without your having to provide them with a key or a temporary code. You don't have to answer the door if the person ringing your bell isn't someone you know or expect.
Automation, especially for needs more complex than a simple timer. You can turn on exterior lights from dusk to 10 PM, instead of every night from 5PM to 10PM. We have grow lights that operate from six AM to sunset because the varying diurnal cycle is critical for proper plant growth and flowering. Other sensors can respond to water, temperature, and humidity, and operate irrigation systems on an as-needed basis.
Multiple sources of control. A traditional light can be controlled via a 3-way or 4-way circuit. An automated fixture can be controlled from as many wall switches as you want to hang, scene controllers, wall pads, remote controls, home theater systems, or even externally via cell phone or web.
Refrigerators are an example of several of these benefits. A smart refrigerator
If you don't accept their cookies, they will send you totally random ads - feminine hygiene products, mayonnaise, Mall of America, etc. The chances are that you will be interested in less than 5% of them. If you take their cookies, they will follow you from Slashdot, Apple, and Honda, then send you an ad for a car with an iPhone interface. At least there is a higher chance you'd be interested, or at least not completely pissed off at the stupid ads.
They don't want to send you ads for stupid or irrelevant stuff, because that's worse than a waste of bandwidth - it may drive you to seek out an ad blocker.
A big part of their problem is their history of sending crap ads that used the same cookie technology.
What might work better is an "anonymous cookie" technology. Instead of sending you a personally identifiable ID, let them access a special "topical cookie area" that has a finite set of pre-defined categories with a finite set of ratings (low/medium/high), and your surfing habits would change the levels of the topics. Slashdot might boost a TECH cookie to "high", and lower your other cookies slightly. Visiting Kimberly-Clark would boost your HOUSEHOLD cookie. Ford would boost your CAR interest. Advertisers could look only at that shared pool of topical cookies and decide which ads to show you. There are lots of details to work out, of course, but it could help preserve anonymity while not completely shutting out targeted ads.
Wait a minute. A couple of days ago the kerfluffle on Slashdot was that Mozilla removed the "disable JavaScript" option from the options screen of Firefox 23.0. I thought that made them evil. Now, they're going to disable third party cookies, so now that makes them good again? I'm so confused.
Why can't they be more like Microsoft, so we can just hate on them 24 x 7?
Or a Remington 12 gauge pump action. With all the movies that use it, that sound has almost become hardwired into our brains to call attention to danger.
Of course, all I can think about then is getting a phone call during a traffic stop and reaching into your pocket to silence the ringer. "Honestly, officer, it's my ring tone!"
The letter 'O' is represented in Morse code by three dashes, while the letter 'M' is represented by two dashes. Therefore the vibration pattern of . . . - - . . . spells out SMS, not SOS. It's a clever and subtle way to announce text messages, and kudos to the Apple engineer who came up with it.
However some complete moron at Apple mislabeled it "S.O.S." in their list of standard vibration patterns, and it remains mislabeled even today. Thus the hate on Apple for lacking attention to detail.
At a crosswalk I once held out my arm in front of a jaywalker. He had his head down in his phone with his earbuds in, he was following the tail of a crowd across a normally not-busy street, he didn't realize the light had completely changed, and he apparently didn't notice there was traffic approaching rapidly from his left. Did I interfere with his right to jaywalk? Yes, intentionally. What would it say about me as a person if I hadn't limited that guy from passing me, and let him step into that street?
Is the guy in the left lane simply inattentive, or is he just a jerk who likes angering drivers that are behind him? Could he be actively driving that way to block people from speeding? Maybe or his radar detector is going off because there's a state trooper in the car ahead of him. Maybe he sees an emergency vehicle on the shoulder ahead, and is avoiding them per state law?
Not everybody's motives are clear, especially when they're driving and you can't ask them why they're going slow in the left lane. But usually, it's because they're inattentive jackasses.
The security model should certainly include signed messages. I wouldn't want to see a repeat of the ADS-B debacle. However, I trust that nothing can't be spoofed or hacked by someone. The private keys could leak out, or even be selectively tampered with by someone with authority.
To solve this, I'd like to see a security model that included a crowd-sourced "validity" rating of the other nearby vehicles. It's not enough that each vehicle sends a signed message. Each vehicle should be comparing the messages it receives with the data it knows, or that it receives from other nearby vehicles. Consider that I'm traveling on a heading of 78 at 88kph. For the last 7 minutes I've been following two vehicles ahead of me, one is VIN#ABC123 and is 50m ahead at my 0 traveling at 88kph and one is VIN#DEF456 and is 43m away at my 5. VIN#123ABC has a blind-spot sensor, and it sends a message saying "My VIN# ABC123. My heading is 78, my speed is 88kph. My traffic: VIN #DEF456 is 3 meters away at 120", Now my computer has some measure of confidence in the reports of VIN#ABC123. My vehicle could then send a signed attestation that data from VIN#ABC123 has been self-consistent since 3:15PM.
But if it said something completely inconsistent, such as reporting its own speed as 110 kph, I could sign an "inconsistent speed" report, so other vehicles could know I am no longer trusting the data from VIN#123ABC.
It'd be like a little dynamic web-of-trust. As long as all the vehicles in my immediate area are transmitting self-consistent data, I'm pretty confident that my vehicle is, too. If one of the vehicles was spouting off nonsense, the other vehicles could still piece the corrupt vehicle's data together from the info each is sharing. The roadways would similarly have to be "reputable" in order to be trusted.
I figure any one vehicle or road segment can be spoofed or hacked. It's much less likely that all the vehicles around me were simultaneously hacked to produce a completely phantom image of the world to my vehicle. If this thing is responsible for keeping a safety bubble around me, I want to know that it's always acting in my best interests with accurate data.
So? Lead isn't any less toxic when it's alloyed. It's only safe when it's contained, as in a copper jacket. You may be less likely to get lead dust on your hands from an alloy bullet than you would from soft lead fishing sinkers, but if the bullet strikes a hard surface it's still going to shatter, leaving a cloud behind. As others have pointed out, indoor shooting ranges still have high levels of lead dust, and need ventilation.
That Dilbert cartoon was based on a reality I think we all share. The business comes in and says "we want the WhizBang package." The giant IT wheels kick in and someone says "you must follow procurement procedures, specify requirements, find vendors, get bids, select vendor, etc." So IT asks "what are your requirements", and the business says "we want what WhizBang does."
From then on facts no longer seem to matter. Some analyst copies WhizBang's brochure into a spreadsheet and labels it Requirements.xls. Someone from IT adds a few rows that have technical requirements the business doesn't care about. "Hey, it says here that WhizBang supports up to 5 simultaneous users. How many users will we have? 10,000? OK, we'll mark that one as a 'doesn't precisely match expectations', let's move on to the next requirement." Someone adds up the tally marks at the end of the process, and surprise, WhizBang matches 80%, while the other packages only come in at 50%.
Business buys WhizBang. WhizBang fails to deliver. Business blames WhizBang.
I didn't claim that every range operator was automatically a member. However, it would be disingenuous to suggest that gun shop owners are not impacted by NRA activities and propaganda, even if they aren't members.
Crap. I had been copying and pasting the mu symbol for micrograms in all of those figures, but they all got stripped and I missed it in preview. Slashcode is removing the HTML mu tag, too. Here's the corrected version with "u" in place of the mu symbol:
While no level of exposure to lead is "safe", NIOSH has a limit of 10 ug/dL for regular people, 5 ug/dL for children, and 30 ug/dL for workers occupationally exposed to lead. In adults, symptoms of blood poisoning become evident at 40 ug/dL.
40 ug/dL is not a lot. The average adult has 50 dL of blood, meaning 2,000 ug (two milligrams) is all it takes to reach the limit. According to wolfram alpha, that amount is the size of about three grains of sand.
The basis for this decision was a blog post titled Checkboxes that kill your product. In it, the author, Alex Limi, former "Head of Firefox UX" at the Mozilla Foundation, repeatedly questions the value of checkboxes and other configuration settings that benefit only 2% of users. Mr. Limi would be absolutely correct in removing these options if those checkboxes were on the face of the browser, where every user was exposed to them on a constant basis. What he completely fails to comprehend (or conveniently fails to bring up because it conflicts with his ideas) is that only about 10% of users know about or ever click on the options panel. That means the same 2% of Firefox users actually represents 20% of the users of the control panel. It's not the insignificant minority of users his choices are affecting that he says it is.
He goes on to claim these 2% are expert users, and that they are capable of maintaining their own changes through about:config settings. Again, he ignores that those people still often enjoy the convenience of a checkbox. He tepidly offers add-ins as a palliative, because those power users, well, you know, they like to add-in stuff.
If he had simply quoted figures that justified the decision, such as "we processed 153,926 trouble tickets last year due to people who turned off the JavaScript checkbox, at a cost to the Mozilla Foundation of $3,000,000 per year", we would understand why they were removed. We understand budgets. Even if he said "2.1% of users screwed up their browser, while only 2.0% of users actually intended to disable javascript", we would understand that there was an actual problem being solved. But he offers no such justifications. These choices were simply implemented without any factual basis.
Slashdot Mirror
They work for a limited definition of work; that definition being they create more sales than they cost.
But that's the entire point. When the score is kept in money, the only thing that counts for those people is more money. If shouty ads get them more money, it works. Not "limited definition of work", but "I now have more money than I spent, therefore it completely worked."
There are major side effects to their advertising tactics: at least half of us think the sellers are unethical, we think their products are stupid and useless junk, the advertisers are prostitutes, and we think people who buy their products are gullible and stupid. The important thing to understand is that they don't care what we think. We are not their target audience, and never have been. Neither you nor I would ever buy a homeopathic "remedy", or a turnip twaddler, or a hairpiece organizer. But enough people do respond to these ads that they make millions of dollars off of them.
Think of them as polluters. Instead of spewing chemicals into a stream, they spew noise onto our televisions.
Discovery Channel had a short-lived series called "PitchMen" (Billy Mays, the star, died after filming the first season, and his backup basically sucked.) It was about a guy whose entire schtick was to market this stuff by shouting. While the products were mostly uninteresting junk, what was actually interesting was the information about the sales. Each day the commercials aired, the call centers took orders for tens of thousands of products. If he agreed to shout for your $20 piece of junk, you were almost guaranteed half a million dollars in sales. Every week it was another powerful demonstration that shouting "works", at least when your goal is to make money.
I always thought almighty god was zeroth level support. As in "You turn this sucker on and I'll pray to god that it works this time!"
From there, it's not good. You pick up the phone and descend to to the first circle of limbo, reserved for call center operators doomed to read from scripts. Next is the second level, where the phones are answered by system support groups, pummeled eternally by threats full of hot air to call their managers. The third level is a noisy, cold, icy machine room where system administrators are berated every time they take a call. The fourth level is where engineers are forced to joust with managers to keep their jobs while their phones ring endlessly. The fifth circle is where the VPs are tormented by joyless CEOs, members of the board, and majority stockholders in status meetings. The sixth circle is reserved for the salesmen who lied about their company's products, where they are surrounded by stacks of flaming four color glossy brochures touting features their systems never supported. The seventh circle is where the CFO sits in a rain of fiery charts of accounts and charges of embezzlement. The eighth circle of callbacks is where the company lawyer sits in a tarpit, where judges and prosecuters jab him with pitchforks full of product liability lawsuits. And the ninth circle is where the CEO is strangled and choked by a rack full of ethernet cables and fiber optic pipes, never understanding why none of them can ever hook up his iPhone to his PC no matter how hard he tries, and is bludgeoned by passing stockholders throwing dead batteries at him.
At least that's how we do support.
I saw a trouble ticket last year that had this line in it (I think it was after Sandy):
[date/time] Site router still down. Technician not en route, no ETA. Escalated to GiantTelCo 8th level support.
I don't care how stupid a manager is, at some point even the dumbest is going to recognize "8th level support" is bullshit. Then they finally might start asking "what are we paying for, exactly?"
Middle men know how to sell things to maximize the profits of the thing makers. It's been a valuable service to thing makers everywhere, even if you don't appreciate what they do or how they do it. Will the Internet make them obsolete? Probably not, because the thing makers still generally suck at marketing.
If the world had unlimited resources and money, and there was no competition for products, they'd be useless. But it doesn't, so they aren't. You don't have to like them or even believe they do any good, but they obviously can sell themselves to people who can't sell there own wares, so you'll be dealing with them for a long time to come.
I allow some content delivery sites, simply because a lot of sites are built that way. Akamai is a clever way to efficiently deliver cacheable media, like pictures, across the country quickly. And sites like Vimeo host their javascript stuff in a separate domain named vimeocdn. I find allowing a few selected exceptions delivers 95%+ of the web, and still effectively manages my perceived risk of javascript exploits.
The shouty ads that stupid people find memorable? Hate to disappoint you, but you see them because they work.
Half the people watching them may have a below average IQ. But the money they're willing to spend is perfectly legitimate, and can be collected by anyone with a low enough moral threshold. Even if you deliberately limit your advertising to only the stupid half of the populous, that's still a shitload of customers.
STATISTICS! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD!
That's certainly not how the Smart Grid has to work.
One way it could work is for you to establish the rate you're willing to pay. A Smart Meter can tell your household appliances "The price of electricity from 4-8PM will follow this schedule: first 2 kWh are $0.20 each. Next 1 kWh is $0.40. Additional kWh are $5.00 each." You can then tell your A/C to "run for no more than 40 minutes per hour whenever the price > $2.00 / kWh", or "run the A/C for no more than $1.00 each hour." Demand pricing would allow you to decide for yourself "I don't want to pay these prices for extra A/C" or "I'm rich and want 70 degrees this afternoon, dammit." Scheduled pricing would allow people on very tight budgets a way to choose between their needs and their wants: TV and a fan, or small window A/C, but maybe not both.
Today I don't have the choice of "spend money and stay cool" or not. Instead, I have a system very much like the one described in the article you quoted. And I'm OK with it.
I had my electric co-op install a peak load controller on my A/C a decade ago. When the electric company sends their signal, the load controller shuts off my A/C for 20 minutes out of each hour. At least 10,000 other co-op members are part of the program as well, and together we have deferred the purchase of a new electric generator by over 10 years - and kept our overall electric rates low as well. My other benefit is that all the electricity my controlled A/C uses is sold to me through a separate meter at their cost: $0.055 / kWh, instead of $0.115 / kWh. My house might go up to a slightly uncomfortable 80 degrees when it's 100 degrees outside, but it knocks at least a hundred dollars off my bill a year. And the program is voluntary; I could call them and have them remove the controller, but then my bill would go back up.
Z-wave home automation devices use an out-of-band pairing step. You have to bring the controller and device to be controlled close together, then operate a manual switch on the controlled device to pair it to the controller. However, their security model appears to be almost entirely through patent-enforced obscurity, rather than any actual technical security. Z-wave door locks are supposed to be "encrypted", but nobody who knows is talking about how the protocols work, how the keys are stored and managed, or other details that would be good to know to evaluate their security.
It may seem frivolous, but there are lots of valid reasons. Most pertain to home automation in general, not just wireless systems, but most home automation systems today use wireless communication. Here are a few off the top of my head.
Energy savings. A smart house (wired or wireless) allows a system to turn off lights and appliances when not in use. While occupancy sensors are not totally reliable today, they can turn lights off from rooms that are not occupied. An unoccupied house could shut off all manner of appliances when the last person leaves. And unlike a kid who has to be reminded to shut off the lights, the system understands the rules 24x7.
Smart grid. The Smart Grid is a system where utilities will charge more for peak electricity in order to reduce demand. Today, on a hot day in August when the demand for A/C is the greatest, the utilities have to fire up "peak generators" which can cost 20 times as much for fuel as coal, hydro, or nuclear power. Assuming you are a rational consumer, you probably want to shut off extra lights and not run the dishwasher when electricity is so expensive. The Smart Grid will send a signal to your meter, saying "from 4-8 PM, charge $3.00/kWh, from 8-12PM charge $0.20/kWh". It will broadcast the electric rate to your appliances. You might configure your dishwasher to say "delay running until electricity is cheaper than $0.30/kWh".
Flexible control. You might only need lighting above a specific task area, but have a track fixture with a dozen lamps. Or you might rearrange the furniture so that a certain task would benefit from different lighting, but the fixtures are recessed and can't be moved. Wireless control lets you change the lighting to something appropriate for the task or room. I synced my low voltage outdoor fence lights to my deck lights with a simple scene change, so I can now walk the dogs after dark without having to leave the fence lights on.
Safety. While I don't think much of the "safety" arguments, there are some points that are important to some people. You can turn on all lights in a panic situation. You can turn off all appliances in case of a fire. Household sensors can detect water leaks, and smart valves can shut off the water supply in response. I do get an alert on my phone if there is a water leak in my basement, so there is certainly value to me.
Security. A wireless door controller and camera can let you allow in authorized service people when you're not home, without your having to provide them with a key or a temporary code. You don't have to answer the door if the person ringing your bell isn't someone you know or expect.
Automation, especially for needs more complex than a simple timer. You can turn on exterior lights from dusk to 10 PM, instead of every night from 5PM to 10PM. We have grow lights that operate from six AM to sunset because the varying diurnal cycle is critical for proper plant growth and flowering. Other sensors can respond to water, temperature, and humidity, and operate irrigation systems on an as-needed basis.
Multiple sources of control. A traditional light can be controlled via a 3-way or 4-way circuit. An automated fixture can be controlled from as many wall switches as you want to hang, scene controllers, wall pads, remote controls, home theater systems, or even externally via cell phone or web.
Refrigerators are an example of several of these benefits. A smart refrigerator
You're close to the IAB's point.
If you don't accept their cookies, they will send you totally random ads - feminine hygiene products, mayonnaise, Mall of America, etc. The chances are that you will be interested in less than 5% of them. If you take their cookies, they will follow you from Slashdot, Apple, and Honda, then send you an ad for a car with an iPhone interface. At least there is a higher chance you'd be interested, or at least not completely pissed off at the stupid ads.
They don't want to send you ads for stupid or irrelevant stuff, because that's worse than a waste of bandwidth - it may drive you to seek out an ad blocker.
A big part of their problem is their history of sending crap ads that used the same cookie technology.
What might work better is an "anonymous cookie" technology. Instead of sending you a personally identifiable ID, let them access a special "topical cookie area" that has a finite set of pre-defined categories with a finite set of ratings (low/medium/high), and your surfing habits would change the levels of the topics. Slashdot might boost a TECH cookie to "high", and lower your other cookies slightly. Visiting Kimberly-Clark would boost your HOUSEHOLD cookie. Ford would boost your CAR interest. Advertisers could look only at that shared pool of topical cookies and decide which ads to show you. There are lots of details to work out, of course, but it could help preserve anonymity while not completely shutting out targeted ads.
No, they are also afraid of us getting a less diverse Internet experience.
De more dey advertise, di-verse it gets!
Thank you, I'll be here all the week. Tip your servers.
Then kudos to Nokia for coming up with it, and shame on Apple for completely screwing it up when they stole it.
Wait a minute. A couple of days ago the kerfluffle on Slashdot was that Mozilla removed the "disable JavaScript" option from the options screen of Firefox 23.0. I thought that made them evil. Now, they're going to disable third party cookies, so now that makes them good again? I'm so confused.
Why can't they be more like Microsoft, so we can just hate on them 24 x 7?
Or a Remington 12 gauge pump action. With all the movies that use it, that sound has almost become hardwired into our brains to call attention to danger.
Of course, all I can think about then is getting a phone call during a traffic stop and reaching into your pocket to silence the ringer. "Honestly, officer, it's my ring tone!"
Set the clock back 48 years, and watch the first minute of the very first episode of Get Smart. It's almost like Mel Brooks could see the future.
The letter 'O' is represented in Morse code by three dashes, while the letter 'M' is represented by two dashes. Therefore the vibration pattern of . . . - - . . . spells out SMS, not SOS. It's a clever and subtle way to announce text messages, and kudos to the Apple engineer who came up with it.
However some complete moron at Apple mislabeled it "S.O.S." in their list of standard vibration patterns, and it remains mislabeled even today. Thus the hate on Apple for lacking attention to detail.
At a crosswalk I once held out my arm in front of a jaywalker. He had his head down in his phone with his earbuds in, he was following the tail of a crowd across a normally not-busy street, he didn't realize the light had completely changed, and he apparently didn't notice there was traffic approaching rapidly from his left. Did I interfere with his right to jaywalk? Yes, intentionally. What would it say about me as a person if I hadn't limited that guy from passing me, and let him step into that street?
Is the guy in the left lane simply inattentive, or is he just a jerk who likes angering drivers that are behind him? Could he be actively driving that way to block people from speeding? Maybe or his radar detector is going off because there's a state trooper in the car ahead of him. Maybe he sees an emergency vehicle on the shoulder ahead, and is avoiding them per state law?
Not everybody's motives are clear, especially when they're driving and you can't ask them why they're going slow in the left lane. But usually, it's because they're inattentive jackasses.
The security model should certainly include signed messages. I wouldn't want to see a repeat of the ADS-B debacle. However, I trust that nothing can't be spoofed or hacked by someone. The private keys could leak out, or even be selectively tampered with by someone with authority.
To solve this, I'd like to see a security model that included a crowd-sourced "validity" rating of the other nearby vehicles. It's not enough that each vehicle sends a signed message. Each vehicle should be comparing the messages it receives with the data it knows, or that it receives from other nearby vehicles. Consider that I'm traveling on a heading of 78 at 88kph. For the last 7 minutes I've been following two vehicles ahead of me, one is VIN#ABC123 and is 50m ahead at my 0 traveling at 88kph and one is VIN#DEF456 and is 43m away at my 5. VIN#123ABC has a blind-spot sensor, and it sends a message saying "My VIN# ABC123. My heading is 78, my speed is 88kph. My traffic: VIN #DEF456 is 3 meters away at 120", Now my computer has some measure of confidence in the reports of VIN#ABC123. My vehicle could then send a signed attestation that data from VIN#ABC123 has been self-consistent since 3:15PM.
But if it said something completely inconsistent, such as reporting its own speed as 110 kph, I could sign an "inconsistent speed" report, so other vehicles could know I am no longer trusting the data from VIN#123ABC.
It'd be like a little dynamic web-of-trust. As long as all the vehicles in my immediate area are transmitting self-consistent data, I'm pretty confident that my vehicle is, too. If one of the vehicles was spouting off nonsense, the other vehicles could still piece the corrupt vehicle's data together from the info each is sharing. The roadways would similarly have to be "reputable" in order to be trusted.
I figure any one vehicle or road segment can be spoofed or hacked. It's much less likely that all the vehicles around me were simultaneously hacked to produce a completely phantom image of the world to my vehicle. If this thing is responsible for keeping a safety bubble around me, I want to know that it's always acting in my best interests with accurate data.
Don't forget to shut off Bluetooth as well. It's already used for tracking purposes.
So? Lead isn't any less toxic when it's alloyed. It's only safe when it's contained, as in a copper jacket. You may be less likely to get lead dust on your hands from an alloy bullet than you would from soft lead fishing sinkers, but if the bullet strikes a hard surface it's still going to shatter, leaving a cloud behind. As others have pointed out, indoor shooting ranges still have high levels of lead dust, and need ventilation.
Not only that but you still need to secure your message otherwise you'll have a problem with pigeon droppings.
I'd like to see Snowden deal with those "leaks".
That Dilbert cartoon was based on a reality I think we all share. The business comes in and says "we want the WhizBang package." The giant IT wheels kick in and someone says "you must follow procurement procedures, specify requirements, find vendors, get bids, select vendor, etc." So IT asks "what are your requirements", and the business says "we want what WhizBang does."
From then on facts no longer seem to matter. Some analyst copies WhizBang's brochure into a spreadsheet and labels it Requirements.xls. Someone from IT adds a few rows that have technical requirements the business doesn't care about. "Hey, it says here that WhizBang supports up to 5 simultaneous users. How many users will we have? 10,000? OK, we'll mark that one as a 'doesn't precisely match expectations', let's move on to the next requirement." Someone adds up the tally marks at the end of the process, and surprise, WhizBang matches 80%, while the other packages only come in at 50%.
Business buys WhizBang. WhizBang fails to deliver. Business blames WhizBang.
I didn't claim that every range operator was automatically a member. However, it would be disingenuous to suggest that gun shop owners are not impacted by NRA activities and propaganda, even if they aren't members.
Crap. I had been copying and pasting the mu symbol for micrograms in all of those figures, but they all got stripped and I missed it in preview. Slashcode is removing the HTML mu tag, too. Here's the corrected version with "u" in place of the mu symbol:
While no level of exposure to lead is "safe", NIOSH has a limit of 10 ug/dL for regular people, 5 ug/dL for children, and 30 ug/dL for workers occupationally exposed to lead. In adults, symptoms of blood poisoning become evident at 40 ug/dL.
40 ug/dL is not a lot. The average adult has 50 dL of blood, meaning 2,000 ug (two milligrams) is all it takes to reach the limit. According to wolfram alpha, that amount is the size of about three grains of sand.
The basis for this decision was a blog post titled Checkboxes that kill your product. In it, the author, Alex Limi, former "Head of Firefox UX" at the Mozilla Foundation, repeatedly questions the value of checkboxes and other configuration settings that benefit only 2% of users. Mr. Limi would be absolutely correct in removing these options if those checkboxes were on the face of the browser, where every user was exposed to them on a constant basis. What he completely fails to comprehend (or conveniently fails to bring up because it conflicts with his ideas) is that only about 10% of users know about or ever click on the options panel. That means the same 2% of Firefox users actually represents 20% of the users of the control panel. It's not the insignificant minority of users his choices are affecting that he says it is.
He goes on to claim these 2% are expert users, and that they are capable of maintaining their own changes through about:config settings. Again, he ignores that those people still often enjoy the convenience of a checkbox. He tepidly offers add-ins as a palliative, because those power users, well, you know, they like to add-in stuff.
If he had simply quoted figures that justified the decision, such as "we processed 153,926 trouble tickets last year due to people who turned off the JavaScript checkbox, at a cost to the Mozilla Foundation of $3,000,000 per year", we would understand why they were removed. We understand budgets. Even if he said "2.1% of users screwed up their browser, while only 2.0% of users actually intended to disable javascript", we would understand that there was an actual problem being solved. But he offers no such justifications. These choices were simply implemented without any factual basis.